Do you have a premium membership?

[Shawn Gossman]

Does your forum have the ability to upgrade to a premium membership?

If so, what do you offer as an incentive to premium members?

How long did you wait until you launched a premium membership? Did you do it right away or launch it later down the road?

 

[Calamity]

I do not - I may eventually have one on my niche career related forum for vendors to advertise with, but it wouldn't give them any benefits just ability to post in special advertising sections. Obviously need to build up activity there first.

 

[Mike30]

- I used to have Premium Membership plans, but I recently changed my forum model to paid members only.
- I offer to members opportunities to make money by participating in contests, by posting, by referring while they help me to develop some projects I am running.
- I started all free for some time, but soon I realized many participants took for granted what I was offering and somehow they felt entitled. So I changed to pay to join only.

 

[AWS]

I did on one of my forums. The forum was rather unique and I was surprised when people bought memberships. I haven't done it since.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

- I used to have Premium Membership plans, but I recently changed my forum model to paid members only.
- I offer to members opportunities to make money by participating in contests, by posting, by referring while they help me to develop some projects I am running.
- I started all free for some time, but soon I realized many participants took for granted what I was offering and somehow they felt entitled. So I changed to pay to join only.

How's the paid only model going?

Are you getting a steady flow of new members and returning active engagement?

 

[Mike30]

How's the paid only model going?

Are you getting a steady flow of new members and returning active engagement?

Well, this has been an experience of its kind.
I originally put that forum for actually testing my own programs/scripts. It was never intended for regular users. It was mainly for admins to demonstrate how my scripts work and offer support for them. I was mainly focused into helping other forums gain activity(bun not at mine)

So, slowly people started joining, but at the beginning all posts were mine basically explaining stuff for admins.
Down the road, admins liked to use some of my programs, but when I asked for some support $$, everyone ran away. So, then I decided to
open more towards regular users and focus my resources to my own forum. So, I started making referral and posting contests.

I got some referrals, but 95% of new referrals are inactive or they are fake accounts (just to win on contests)
I said, ok, fine, now new signups got to pay. And I deleted inactive accounts and from 60 members, I came down to 31.
I am not really even advertising the forum, letting the users do that so they earn the commissions per referral.
As for activity, I did setup a board to show their Year/progress as far as posts count, words written and other metrics and giving credits for each word written so they can cash out later after the year ends.

It has been, I don't know, somewhere 2-3 weeks ago since I stopped free registrations. No new sign ups as of today. But a least I feel more comfortable
talking to active members instead having a ghost town.

So, it's too early to say. But I am more into making a small solid community than showing numbers of members.
The main purpose of the pay-only is to weed out those not too interested in the topic of my forum and give the opportunity to my members to earn 50% recurring commissions. I am not in a hurry to grow the forum itself, I am more interested in making/developing one of my projects to hit the jackpot but I need a solid/loyal base of users to start with, popularity will come later.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Do keep us updated on the progress.

I am a paid community manager of Copyblogger. Our Academy is paid only. I noticed modern online communities can be successful at it.

The paid forum side interests me!

 

[Mike30]

The best place to be up to date it's been in the forum itself Been inside, you can see what's needed or what can be improved from your perspective and knowledge. and also learn from my mistakes.