Three ways to monetise your community with WoltLab Suite
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Aethior -
November 5, 2024 at 9:00 AM -
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Monetizing your online community is a way to help pay for the costs of running a website as well as a way to make extra money at the end of the month. Here are three easy ways to start making money through your forum or community with WoltLab Suite.
Display advertising in your community
This is possibly the easiest and most popular way to start making money with your online community. WoltLab Suite natively offers the option to display ads in your community, being easily configurable and being able to choose between different options. Not only does it allow you to choose what type of ad you want to show, as well as in which space of your website you want it to appear, it also allows you to configure its display according to different parameters such as the group to which the user belongs, age, gender, language or schedule, among other options, being able to customise the target audience of your ads.
In order to start using ads in your community you must activate this option in the Administration Control Panel (ACP) of your website following the path 'Configuration → Modules → Customisation → Ads'. Once activated, the option to manage ads will appear in the menu of the Administration Panel in the ‘Customisation’ tab.
Our recommendation is not to saturate your community with ads, but to be able to choose the right place to display advertising so that your users are not forced to use an ad blocker.
Use paid subscriptions
This is another of WoltLab Suite's default options and allows you to generate added value for your community. If your community has a large enough mass of users, you may want to create exclusive spaces for people who support your community through a paid subscription. This section could be a restricted forum for subscribers only, where they can discuss things that the rest of the members cannot read, or access to certain features of the website. In short, it is a way for members of your community to have access to certain privileges through a recurring payment.
We recommend that you know how to calculate the cost of subscriptions, not overprice them so that users are willing to make a recurring payment month after month.
Accept donations from users
Do you have a community willing to collaborate in its maintenance? In that case, one option could be donations. There are different ways to accept online donations, such as PayPal or Buy Me a Coffee. And I'll focus on the latter because of its suggestive method. Surely you have ever surfed the internet looking for the solution to a problem and found it in a hidden personal blog, which you had not even heard of but you would have liked to invite its author for a drink after solving the problem. Well, this is the premise of this method: the author puts a button on his website with which you can invite him (donate) the price of a coffee.
In WoltLab Suite there is a similar plugin that allows you to receive donations via PayPal. It is the complete 'Donation box' by cls-design and you can find it for free in the WoltLab Plugin Store. This plugin allows you to decide which object you want to receive as a donation, choosing between beer, coffee, cookies,... or you can set a custom object by yourself. It also lets you set the price of each donation and the maximum amount that can be donated.
Would you like to try one of these solutions and start earning money with your community?
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