Netmums – How they monetize their online forum
How Netmums monetizes its online forum
Challenge
To monetize their online forum without having to manually implement affiliate links nor impacting the experience of their audience
Solution
Netmums installed Skimlinks on their forum, which contains thousands of product mentions, to automatically turn all their product links into monetizable affiliate links
Results
- Over 30,000 unique affiliated links created automatically
- Leading to more than 110,000 products sold via affiliates
Netmums began in the year 2000 as a website connecting local moms with one another to exchange childcare advice, activity ideas and more. Today, the site has grown into a robust online parenting organization spanning the U.K. with over 1.8 million members and 2 million weekly unique users.
Netmums’ impact doesn’t stop with their online presence. They offer a vibrant network of 151 established local websites, 300 national groups for moms to meet offline and 2,300 parent bloggers that cover family-focused content on the site.
Challenge:
The popular forum section of the parenting site, which boasts 15 million global page views per month and an average of 200,000 posts each month, has countless references to products that moms recommend, are interested in and engage with.
To try and take advantage of that revenue opportunity, the editorial team at Netmums had to manually create affiliate links for each product recommendation.
This process was extremely time-consuming and difficult and didn’t offer any real incentives, as the links weren’t profitable when taking into account the time spent creating them.
Solution:
Ready to give up affiliate links because of the complicated, tedious process and the large number of product mentions in the forums, Netmums was introduced to Skimlinks. The “set and forget” nature of the Skimlinks tool fit perfectly with Netmums desire for an easy, hands off approach to monetization.
The links mentioned in the forums were automatically affiliated thanks to Skimlinks unique technology and Netmums was able to focus on creating content instead of worrying about manually creating affiliate links.
It was the right time, perfect solution, just to drop in that piece of code on the site and not have to do anything else.
Results:
With Skimlinks, Netmums was able to monetize one of the most popular parts of its website: the forum section that generates large amounts of content and product references.
Since joining Skimlinks, the highly active moms that frequent the forum have generated more than 30,000 unique product references, which resulted in equally as many affiliated links and over 110,000 products being sold via Netmums’ forum.
Over 30,000 unique product references
Automatically affiliated via Skimlinks
More than 110,00 products
Sold as a result, bringing affiliate revenue to Netmums
Netmum’s keys to success:
- Use your resources wisely; manually incorporating affiliate links was not worth the time/effort of the Netmums team.
- Find a monetization solution that works for you. An easy, hands off approach was exactly what Netmums needed to focus their attention on content creation efforts.
- Keep your audience in mind and foster their growth. For Netmums, monetizing only their forums allows active community members to source and recommend products, while Netmums editorial team focuses on the editorial portion of the site
To monetize your forum, join skimlinks today.
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