500 targeted and involved members is great! IF - you reverse the process: Start a highly selective paid Membership Site in a targeted niche Then add a VIP Members Only private forum for a small monthly upcharge. Give the VIP forum members extra value content that regular members don't get. Make even more money by selling/reselling unique info/products to the members. Add a members only Classified/Auction section and take a small fee for addons like pictures, video, etc. Think OUTSIDE the box! You can make a lot of money with the right 500 members Best of Success, S.
What some forums do is put ads on the pages (auto ad posting bots?) and then add a premium subscription. Put whatever content in the premium subscription you want, but putting in "No ads!" is smart, many people hate ads and will even pay to be rid of them. Of course there is adblock but the general public will not know of this.
A forum can be hard to make money from,, Unlike a tube or pic site, where you can hide ads in amoung posts, and kinda trick visitors into clicking, forum users tend not to click ads/banners. Unless the ad is something they were looking for.. My forum is a year old (it's adult even harder to make money from) and last month I had 20K UV and 800K page views,, just about moving from small forum into mid size forum range. But it is my hobby, and was never started as something I ever thought of making money from, but then I found DP and started to read about ads and banners, and thought that a few banners might pay for my hosting.. So now I run banners from BLA (I get about $15 per month) and JA ( I get about $12 per month) I also sell a few links and short term banners ( About $10 per month) But a forum has to be a labour of love and something you work on long term,, If it is just something you think you can make money from, you should think again,, or be ready to put in 6 months work to build it up..
There is lots of option to make money with forums such as placing ads on it, placing links of other websites etc.
After making forum you need to get a huge traffic then after only you can make some profit. For more information you can go for http://www.earnfrominternet.org . So you can go accordingly. There are many of the forum owner making a lot profit but only when you create a good numbers of users.
I've been working with at one of the leading free forums hosting so I have quite an experience in forums revenues. The classic way that has been used along the years was the classic Adsense. But you might want to try out also http://www.linkbucks.com/
If you get quality member, many way to monetize it Banner,Ads,Affiliate,Paid Membership how about make your own product that fit on your niche?
Ads, subscriptions, building list, selling product and service coms%.. but it's pretty tough making decent money though any forum.. unless you got a set of team dedicating to it for years like this forum.
Once your forum is created with a stable amount of traffic, and new members creating profiles daily, then you can start looking into advertisement. Remember like the "Social Network" says adds arnt cool. Get yourself established first then exploit the s**t out of it
You could have a paid membership with the best content, that's the best way to go even for small forums. But you still have to build it and start getting traffic, so focus on that for now...
ofcourse ads, CPC is best for starters i belive, CPA is much harder ... but you need alot of users and give them reasons to register like dofollow backlinks in signature.
Basically most forums earns money through advertising. But even if you had a forum that doesn't mean your going to earn easily it still has a lot of work to like site optimization SEO and stuffs.
You can make money with forums through Google adsense, kontera, vibrant media, or infolinks. I'd recommend you check out http://www.adminbb.com - which is a community for forum owners, and also, remember one thing, without quality content, your forum will not earn money. You need to work on the content, before you think about making money. Why? New forums don't last too long without great content, and being unique.
u need consider make a niche forum, and have some users posts... the bad is the forums have low % "new visitors" and your users know the ad space area, and is dificult they click in the ad.