Has anybody ever thought of selling their own forum merchandise? For example, maybe mugs, t-shirts, posters and whatnot with the forum logo and people's usernames on it You could then sell them and potentially make some extra revenue for the forum, plus help get the word out about the forum if people wear/show them off in public.
I've always thought it would be fun to do, but never really had the motivation or funds to do such a thing.
I'm not sure people would buy these types of things unless the T-shirts, mugs, and other stuff are a very good deal like a few dollars, and shipping was very cheap.
I'm on a couple of forums that do this, successfully.
One forum had about 300k members, and they were giving away T-Shirts to all members who had a subscription with them, either paid or promoted.
When you sell/give away, you really need to think "if I waste this money, will I get it back?", and these forums did and so they ended up in a profit, as noted by the increase in membership and subscriptions, and that's before adding Adsense and advertisers.
Giving away some merchandise might be a good incentive for members to join a forum's e-mail mailing list for a weekly or monthly newsletter which promote affiliate products and services where you get a percentage of the earnings from sales your affiliate links generated.
I've had this idea before. It depends primarily on the product in question, and on your target audience as you may have guessed. If you make a brand for your forum or have a graphic designer that can style some cool images, people will be more open to it. And t-shirts shouldn't be more than 15-20 dollars, with smaller and less complex/useful items scaled down appropriately.
I think its hit/miss, but no reason why it wouldn't work.
Forum merchandise is iffy. You really need to provide a reason for them to purchase the stuff...it's better off given as free in my opinion. That way people would be glad to use it.
In my opinion you're better off giving away stuff like custom notepads or pens because those are much more subtle and many people are willing to use them...and it provides a subtle advertisement instead of blatant ads like t-shirts or mugs.
