How many $/month you make from your Forum?

Hi DP´ers!

I just startet my own forum, and would like to know how high earnings i should expect...

I´ll get indexed on google within the next few days, but have no backlinks yet.
Any tips on how to "kick-start" a forum?

 

My forums are struggling at $100/month and that is with around 1500 uniques a day, and over 13,000 members and 150,000 posts.

 

i'd concentrate on getting members first. getting over that intial hump is the hard part as you need daily postings and interaction to have a good thriving forum.

then once you have that, you can start putting in adsense to test them.

if you start off plastering adsense all over, potential members might be turned-off on joining.

gotta sucker them in first! good luck!

btw..forums are notoriously low for CTR. if you can get 1%..you're doing good.

 

I noticed on my forums (im not going to say how much i make), but i make a lot more simply by impressioning the adverts.

What about you guys?

Pierce

 

I wrote an eBook on how to monetize forums after beating my head on the wall for years- then stepping back to think long and hard about "the game".
It really is a game, as you need to understand that people are not visiting discussion forums because they are in the market for something- they are there to chat with like-minded people.
BUT- there are ways to monetize them if you keep your nose to the grindstone.

 

I don't know, how many times can you and your 9 members click?

But seriously, don't expect very much. When I start my forums, I don't put any ads on them for two months, sometimes three. I build up membership, change things to meet visitor expectations, so that they spread the word and bring in more visitors. It's only after I have a stable group of core members, and are getting constant traffic, do I put any sort of ads on it, and for the first two months of the ads, I keep the ads on the bottom so they won't interfere with navigation. I.e. the last thing you want to do is make your visitors believe you just want to make a buck off them. After another month or so, you can put an ad on top, or do it the way DP has it. Forums are an investment; you need to build loyalty and traffic before you can monetize it. But once you've gotten those two things, you will be making money off the forum for years to come without ever having to do any real work on it (the occassional emails, assign mods, etc.)

 

forums are VERY VERY tough to make money in, I have one that gets major traffic and generates virtually no revenue at all.. there are alot better ways to make cash on the net

 

I was getting $300-350 a month with my forum, using Adsense, Kontera, and by making agreements with other advertising companies that were in my forum niche via banners to make money.

 

How much "major traffic" are we talking about? Forums aren't that hard to convert into money. You just have to sell them the right product. Are you doing affiliate sales on your forum?

 

last i heard shawn makes 20k/month with this forum
and im sure if it was a different market the CTR would be higher... the sky is the limit i suppose.

 

I make a meesly $100 a month, but I only have 50 registers

 

Its not hard to make money from a forum, espically ones with large traffic volumes and large audiences.

For a forum, it changes CTR no longer matters. Page impressions is the name of the game. It turns into something like TV where your visitors are shown ads constantly.

Okay for text ads this doesnt work, but for image ads, its just like TV, you get brainwashed.

And seriously dont sit there and whine, oh i have a huge forum and it doesnt make me any money, use your audience!!

Pierce

 

I agree with Jack.

I don't know how other people feel out there but sometimes a forum isn't as much about it's revenue as it is its value.

Forums, have loyalty, return visitors, you get thousands of users' emails, users generate new and fresh content everyday and it's dynamic and flexible. So with a bit of "management" and "SEO" you can literally be sitting on a gold mine just in terms of users - completely ignoring the revenue that the forums earn from AdSense. You have something that with good management will have a longer lifetime than a regular website that needs to be updated personally.

I mean if you have 10,000 members, that is 10,000 members that potentially will make daily visits to your site, you have 10,000 members that you can email whenever you want, you have 10,000 users who could be potentially creating new pages for search engines everyday. You have 10,000 members that are probably more than happy to market your own site for you just because they like it, and more often than not these forums are also self managing because you have members that are willing to moderate and maintain the forums.

So at the end of the day focusing on squeezing those extra $$ out of your forums via AdSense may really be hurting you forum's real value, which is product of years and years of loyal member building.

 

Very little from forum...maybe more after I redesigned it and made it look more appealing.

Made a bit more past days since I'm selling footer links.

 

last month I made... $256

 

jack, wonderful post. Thanks.

 

anyone that can post how much they earn from THIS forum?

 

$0 - Shawnie gets all my thread's earnings.

 

thx for the advise Jack!

I removed my inline ads for now. Maybe the top ones will disappear too...
But the top can be hidden if the users want it to, so i think i might keep it for now.

I know forums are not easy to monetize, but if you get it up runnin´, it won´t take much of your time, compared to a normal website.

 

Yes, but it's much harder to get it up and running than a website is.