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Best Practices for Monetizing Forums
So… you are thinking about using SkimLinks & SkimWords on your forum, great! We know that forums are tight knit communities that are built on trust, and that readers are understandably sensitive to advertising. We’ve put together a presentation on the ‘Best Practices for Monetizing Forums Using Skimlinks’ that provides a step by step guide on how you can customize SkimLinks (automatic link affiliation) and SkimWords (link insertion based on relevant products) to provide the best user experience possible.
We suggest a gradual roll-out, where you select the right features for your community. We highly recommend disclosing your use of Skimlinks products to your readers – we actually financially encourage you to – because honesty and transparency is key, and the feedback we get is that our service adds value to the reading experience.
Our four step staggered roll out plan is:
- (1) Install & configure
- (2) Inform your team, test & review
- (3) Disclose Skimlinks
- (4) Roll out & monitor reaction.
Check out the presentation above for all the details.
Have any other tips for monetizing forums? Share them with us!
Looking to get started with SkimLinks and SkimWords? Sign up or reach out to one of our brilliant account managers!
2 Comments to Best Practices for Monetizing Forums
AaronFebruary 11, 2012
Hi Ariel, wanted to make sure we got back to ya, since we’d love for you to be able to use SkimWords too!
1. If/when 
you are going to try SkimWords again, we’d recommend putting up a disclosure post when rolling it out so your readers aren’t caught off guard. You can also roll out slowly and monitor the reaction, as well as customize the look, feel and targeting of SkimWords to show it to a select group of folks if appropriate. For example, you can show it only to non-registered users, or whatever makes sense for your community.
2. Not to deflect, but we got your support email on that same issue and… sounds like it wasn’t us! We have never, nor will we use double lines to call out links! We take great pride in making SkimWords highly relevant to your users by matching up to specific product references, and trying to avoid linking in a way that you described. Please follow up with us if you are seeing anything odd, but it sounds like another company’s link. Are you using any other platforms for advertisements with text? Please note that with SkimWords you can also dial up or down the amount of links you want to include.
The tips from our best practices for forum monetization presentation are quite relevant here! http://www.slideshare.net/AaronWeissman/best-practices-for-monetizing-forums-using-skimlinks?from=ss_embed
Please check it out, let us know what you think! We’d also love to hear about any best practices you use on OffBeatEmpire.com.
Happy Friday,
Aaron
Leave a comment
January 25, 2012
I use SkimLinks on my forum and it’s awesome — I would love to be able to use SkimWords as well, but ran into a couple significant issues:
1. Members were baffled and confused when words were turned into monetized links. “Has the site been hacked?” one asked me. Another reported, “OMG, I’m so sorry — I think I’ve got a virus on my computer, I don’t know how that link got in there!”
2. I got seriously freaked out by how the phrase “wedding dress” linked through to weight loss products. I felt like I needed serious, granular control over which words were going to be linked.