What is estimated cost of starting Webmaster forum?

Say you want to start a new Webmaster forum (using vbulletin) and you outsource the managing/ moderating/ administering work what would be minimum start up costs and monthly costs.
Hosting would not be too expensive unless forum grows to be huge (100,000 members or more) so main cost would be labor cost to administer and add content to the forum.

Any webmaster forum owner, care to share your costs

 

Well, it really depends, there is no definitive cost. A lot of the money will be spent on advertising, and that will depend on how much you have to spend. What you should do is get a budget for the whole project and then split it up in order of importance (ie, 50% advertising, 30% staff, 20% forum posters), but that's just an example, obviously it'll vary depending on the individual project.

 

Everything depends on the forum size
But an average price for monthly including hosting+moderator I would say 50$

 

Way higher. You will need a dedicated server, a decent one will be at least $100
You can start up with a moderator, but with time you will need several.

Also, you will need several paid forum posters when starting the forum to create topics and start discussions.

The main problem is advertising, getting people to register on the forum. The startup part is the most difficult, after that all comes to management.

 

Yes it seems the expenses you will get are below:

1. Your server and hosting space (good one will be $7.00 + a month)

2. Paid posters to start the forum up and get some discussion and make it look good.

3. Advertising, backlinks, marketing, this is where you are going to spend your most money, i mean alot of this can be done for free through social media, and forum posting on other forums , but this will take some money and will be the biggest amount of money spent.

4. You don't have to start out with moderators i don't feel, it really depends on how many topics you have and subject. I would start moderating everything myself at first, and then using some adsense or affiliate marketing i would let some money come back to me before starting to hire moderators.

5. You vbulletin licence.

I hope this has helped if you have any other questions please feel free to let me know, I will be more than happy to help you.

 

I second ShawnsITSolutions with everything. Bravo on a good reply

Paid Posters are actually pretty cool (wish I thought of a company like that first!), I've been using some for about a week now on my site and it's filling in nicely (the worst part about this is that I've been racking my brain trying to figure out who is a real visitor, and who is paid )

 

The only cost involved beyond the outsouring part is the cost of vB software and a shared hosting plan - the lowest one possible. Don't buy overkill in the beginning. And I'm not even gonna comment on the prospect of starting a webmaster forum in 2008

 

Thanks for the nice reply comidatalk.

But, as markn26 was saying, he is going to be the nice guy , I will be the bad guy i guess.

I believe what he was trying to say is that this is going to be VERY VERY competitive, and you better have some good money or good marketing tactics set aside for this. Because right now you have to compete with ALOT of places like DP here for example, sitepoint, webhosting-talk.com.

There is alot of competition out there for this, so your marketing is going to have to have a nice bit of money backed up to put into this or alot of time devoted to self promotion on all the things you need.

Also, if I was wrong and that is not what markn26 was trying to be nice about then I apoligize and the above comment was something I feel needs to be said to help give you as much information as possible.

 

I think you need around $70-100 a month to run a decent forum.

 

Thanks for the informative post. Rep given.

Hmm.. well $70 - $100 a month is quite affordable but that seems quite low. I think you may have assumed doing the maintenance/ administering yourself instead of outsourcing

 

I used to run a successful making money online forum TG and i spent around $100/month to hire some forum poster to keep my forum alive and then i moderate the forum manually.

 

It will nearly cost $75. For advertisements it will cost more and more.

 

Well that can be even lower. My forum costs £65 a year for license. $3 a month for hosting with unlimited disk space and 250gb bandwith. My advertising is free as i use dp and forum signatures etc. Even my msn username has it on lol. I got friends to post and have a trustworthy friend as moderator which costs nothing as he enjoys the site. So overall about £90 a year.