The vast shift from a traditional business approach to an online business approach is as apparent as night and day.
The online world and the various digital tools have helped businesses reach new heights. The change is so prominent that you cannot possibly ignore it nor not seek benefits from it.
This has made way for businesses to establish themselves further through something called community portals.
However, aside from establishment, there are methods to earn money from said community portals used to create online portals where users interact around a shared interest, chat, impart knowledge and ideas for better understanding of target audience preferences and product evolution, paid services and ad sales.
This article will focus on strategies that will allow businesses to monetize community portals. If you are interested, this article is meant for you.
So, without further ado, let us get right on the topic.
Affiliated Promotion of Products
This method, right off the bat, is one of the easiest strategies on this list for monetizing your community portals.
In fact, nearly 81% of companies utilize this strategy to drive sales. This allows you to find stores that you can conveniently do business with.
To execute this strategy, you first need to search and bring forth the products that are in demand with your audience.
You need to be mindful to find products that your audience will be interested in as well as something that is well within your niche.
The best part about this strategy is that you can opt to advertise multiple products all at one go. Also, you may accommodate this strategy with other monetizing strategies that you might have opted for.
Therefore, this strategy is an excellent choice that you may conveniently opt for.
Construct Membership Site
A great way to monetize your community portal is to create a membership site. What you can do is start by offering free content to your audience.
Your job at this point is to create and upload relevant content to your brand that will interest your audience. It can be in the form of online courses, ebooks, webinars, archive extensions, and more.
Once they start showing interest, you may offer them additional exclusive content that they can access after paying a membership fee.
You may add various payment methods to allow your audience to make hassle-free transactions.
However, the thing that you need to focus on here is to make sure your content is worth paying the membership fee for.
Also, your initial free content should be attractive and meaningful for your audience to pay attention to.
Therefore, this strategy requires you to have proper knowledge about what your audience wants. Once you have that figured out, this strategy is a great way to monetize your community portal.
Put up Branded Merchandise for Purchase
Have you ever bought branded merchandise of your favorite shows or fandom? It is not really about the merchandise but the feeling of belonging to a community.
The same can be applied as a strategy to monetize your community. When you have grown quite a few followers of your community, you can put forward this feeling of belonging to a community in the form of branded merchandise.
You will allow your audiences to be a part of your community, and all of this can be achieved in the easiest way possible.
Print-on-demand companies can help meet your demand for merchandise. With their help, you can easily offer your audiences a range of products to choose from.
This way, you will not only monetize your community but also help grow brand awareness and brand loyalty.
It is a great strategy that will help you get closer to your audience and develop a deeper, more emotional bonding.
Request for Donation
Lastly, another great way to monetize your community is by requesting donations. If you believe that your customers and audiences are on par with your brand’s beliefs and want to help contribute to it, they can offer donations.
However, simply asking for donations is not the easy way to go. Here, you need to develop deeper and more meaningful emotional bonding with your audience.
The type of bonding where they believe in your causes and will have good reasoning behind their donations. If you have that kind of relationship with your audience, you can opt for that strategy.
Implementing this strategy is extremely easy as all you would need are donation forms. Remember to be thankful and show the results for which the donations are collected.
Conclusion
So these are the top-most utilized and effective strategies that brands use to monetize their community portals. All of these strategies are easy to execute and have excellent results that you can rely on.
Therefore, if you are interested, you may come back to this article to refer to these strategies and make the best out of your community portals.
After all, people are the driving forces behind your company and its biggest assets.
