Help me set up a car forum!

Hi everyone first off I want to say that i'm a complete noob and i'm here to learn a lot from everyone. I have many questions but i'm willing to learn! So i really like car forums and have been a member on several of them. I would like to create my own for a kind of niche community. Of course I want to make money from the website but at the same time I love cars and forums. How does this all work? Is it hard? Is it worth it? I know the basics i believe: Get a domain name, host the site, use vbulletin(seems like the best as most forums i've been to use that), get PHP 5.2.6, or later and MySQL 5.0.19 or later. Although I don't know how to put all that together I was looking at Glowhost and it seems they offer packages that take care of all that with vbulletin included, but then I feel like I wont learn a whole lot, lol. Anyways if I go with glowhost how will i manage the site through them or vbulletin? Also very important how to manage the forum? Do the moderators get paid? How much? Does anyone have any experience with car forums? Is it possible to make at least $100k/year? Do car manufacturers or tuning/customizing/ aftermarket companies related to the car(s) offer good pay to advertise their services on the forum? I know it requires to have a lot of members and posts/traffic but I think it can grow pretty fast. What are your guys' thoughts? Please give me any info the more realistic the better. Sorry for the long rant but I would greatly appreciate any info on this as i'm looking to make the forum soon with the upcoming 2012 NAIAS in detroit. Thanks everyone

 

Mate, i can see by the questions that you asked that your ambitions are far greater than your abilities.

My honest opinion and i certainly dont mean to offend you, is that you would be incapable of making it work. Unless you have 2-3 years that you can dedicate to growing it.....you dont stand a chance.

Just my honest opinion.

Cheers.

 

lol snooks give him a break, can't you see his username? He's a dreamer

Anyways digital dream, here is one way how you can money money with your forum. Find a reliable host, install your forum ( I would suggest you not let anyone do anything for you, you need to learn and gain experience) After everything is installed and configured, signup for google adsense and hope you get approved google will pay you between 15-75 cents every time some clicks on the ad. Now do the math 100 clicks a day = 25-70 dollars per day that's not so bad is it?

Now as your site increases traffic you will start earning more and more from clicks, medium sized wesites make any where between 100-500 dollars a day in ads alone.

 

Excellent is the only word i can give u for this wonderful post, keep it up. I will come back again to read some more interesting things on this topic

 

It's very unlikely to make $100k/yr off a forum or anywhere close to there any time soon. Forums are known to be some of the slowest growing websites around and can take years to see good results. It does depend a lot on your niche though. If you have a forum with amazing content in an untouched niche then go for it. Otherwise it will probably be a long uphill battle for months and months.

 

If you don't have an active group of supporters to start a niche car forum you are literally pissing in the wind.

I've started and admin'ed for 2 car forums. First one, off road site. Started with 20 people now has under 800 people. 45k posts in 1.5 years and has a steady loyal following. Posts are all high quality, high tech for that niche.

2nd is a Mustang forum, started with 200+ people the runoff of a dying local site. 23k posts in under 2 months and 300+ members. Had a local track rental already, building pics, video content like a banshee.

Bottom line, if you don't start off with a large core of people who know that niche and will post relevant content, you might as well just start another off topic genre forum.