I currently have my own forum: www.nationalgunforum DOT com. I added some cool features such as a arcade, casino, Bronze, Silver, & Gold memberships. They are cheap and last forever.... At least for now because it is new. I started the memberships only one week ago. I have since sold 5-6. Making me 100-120 Bucks. I do have advertisement at the top that is 100 bucks for 6 months and 100 for the smaller ads that do not rotate. I make about 120 a month on my forum AFTER expenses. My forum is growing pretty fast. It is one year old and I have yet to cave in and make fake users OR worthless posts. Everything is REAL. Which makes the quality of the forum tremendous. I believe forums can become one of the most profitable websites out there. I also, own my own business that is relates. As you can see The Holster Store is my business and look at the banner... Huge in the middle. I get hundreds of clicks. Forums are good. Just make your forum have QUALITY, NOT Quantity!
Forums can be very hard to get going. and Take a lot of advertising to be established. Def. finding a niche that you are into will help a lot. The design of your forum and colors are very important. If the colors are harsh your visitors will not be back. Also if you decide to go with a forum. Use all the featured mods as possible. People love to play around in their control panel or get points etc. Starting a blog is another good idea. I personally have been looking into this my self. I've been looking into blogging software for the last week now. Anyone have any good ideas? I don't want it remotely hosted. I want to host it on my server. Better seo that way. Until laters
In my experience, forums are a lot of work, but if you put the work into them, building the member base, expanding the communities etc, then you can stand to earn a lot from it. There are a lot of forums out there already, and so there is always a lot of competition. Remember you have to try and offer something unique. The best way, as stated before is to sell VIP packages of your forum, maybe offering the lack of displayed ads, and other features related to what the forum is about. Offering incentives to the first 50 or so members also helps to promote early posts, and maybe offer some sort of referral system in order to build the ranks of your page. Hope this helps ^^ For blogging software, i hear wordpress is very popular, but i've little experience of it
Yeah i know it's a lot of work I already start one but i was not the owner of the server so i didn't make money with my 5000 member and one day the owner put me out of the admin team
From my experience, forums are very hard to make money with. You have to have thousands of visitors per day just to get people to sign up. At that point you will only be making a small amount. If you have the time and advertising captial go for it, otherwise invest in something easier like affiliate marketing.
yeah, and I think forums are a worthwhile thing to get into. You can probably get people to pay as long as the VIP features are really significant.
From my personal point of view, forum is the tool to "re-direct" visitors to other sites. Those banners on boards usually belong to admin or moderators of the boards if the forum is new. Technically it is hard to make cash from forum but there is a hidden scene where you are able to turn your visitors into sales.
I have several blogs and I really want to launch a forum, appreciate your answers here. How about adsense revenue sharing forum? do some guys here do it?
The problem with the adsense revenue is that I didn't find one for phpbb but only for vbulletin that cost some money