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Monetizing Vanilla forum with paywalls?
Hello everyone!
Any help here would be greatly appreciated!
I'm trying to monetize my forums in the least intrusive way possible and wondering your take on the best way to go about it ...
A few questions:
1) How can I make the answers to discussion questions invisible unless you're a paid member? Screenshot of what I'm talking about: http://screencast.com/t/ThtFsSJ0L
2) If I do go this route, will SEO be severely hit?
If this is hard to do or a bad idea, what are some alternatives?
Thanks all!
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Comments
SEO penalty depends on the answers. If they are only "yes"/"no", that will has no impact
But content is SEO driver number one and if the answers are full of valuable content (and that's what I would expect from answers) there will be a severe impact on SEO, I assume.
It would be quite easy to realize that, though...
You could try to show only the first X characters of answers as an alternative.
I do not have real knowledge about monetizing forums, but there are professionals here =>
http://pages.vanillaforums.com/monetize-money-community-forum
http://blog.vanillaforums.com/help/monetizing-community-forum/
SEO is about relivance. So you have to think about what people are going to type into a search engine in the first place.
Youw would have to encourage quality questions, and also good quality answers. Which is behavioural.
You would need a plugin to hide the comments, I would do it based on role. Purchase Premium Role plus MarketPlace plugins could do that. However by my own admission the subscription side of thing needs work and funding. At the moment it is good for set period and one time purchases. Recurring is not there yet.
You would have to invest in the interface of the paywall.
Monetising anything it not really to do with the framwork choice per say, it is about your business concept, and you customers, and their behaviour.
grep is your friend.
Of course there are alternatives, but I can't say they are better in your case.
Many sites (nwespapers) do provide premium content. Some of them actualy feed that information to search engines, so it is technically avaiable to users. However they use obscuring methods you hide, or make it diffcult to read. It is not full hidden, and if you have a enough technically skill you can read it. However it is not coviennt for a non technical user to unobscure it. There is at least one well know technical forum that works on this basis or did).
Other newspapers work on the basis of having seeprate free and premium content. They have a process of selection for that.
grep is your friend.