Am planning on starting a forum as a part of one of my career oriented website The website already has a mailing list of 12000+ individuals signed up in the age range of 18-27 years I have been sending newsletters to them every month since the last two years and get an email open rate of 5000+ This has been a long outstanding demand from my guys to start a forum so that they can discuss and chat amongst each others also and i expect that atleast 10-20% of my current subscribers to sign up at the forum Being a career oriented forum, i m not quite sure about its viability These are my questions: 1. Is this age group of forum users good enough in covering the running costs of the forum? 2. Can adsense earn me enough to cover the hosting costs from these many subscribers? 3. Which is the forum board software that you recommend? 4. What kind of promotions should i do, other than recommending through a special newsletter to sign up and announcing on my website to sign up? 5. What should be the keyword that i should promote for the forum say for example, if my website had the primary keyword of "fashion model training" then what should be the primary keyword for my forum? 6. What is the minimum subscriber base, thread count and daily post count required to attain a decent adsense revenue? Hope the PROS here can give me some answers THANKS in advance
1. Is this age group of forum users good enough in covering the running costs of the forum? Yes, it should be. 2. Can adsense earn me enough to cover the hosting costs from these many subscribers? If you do get ad clicks, you should get enough to cover the bills, and more. 3. Which is the forum board software that you recommend? Either vBulletin or SMF. 4. What kind of promotions should i do, other than recommending through a special newsletter to sign up and announcing on my website to sign up? Try link exchanging with other users? Or buying ad space? Or ranking high in Google? 5. What should be the keyword that i should promote for the forum say for example, if my website had the primary keyword of "fashion model training" then what should be the primary keyword for my forum? Sorry, I don't get what you're asking. 6. What is the minimum subscriber base, thread count and daily post count required to attain a decent adsense revenue? It all depens on the niche, and ad clicks.
1. Is this age group of forum users good enough in covering the running costs of the forum? Yes,but if you get the age group around 30-40 then it would better. 2. Can adsense earn me enough to cover the hosting costs from these many subscribers? Yes coz the hosting cost is small amount which is around $20/years. 3. Which is the forum board software that you recommend? I would suggest you use vB. 4. What kind of promotions should i do, other than recommending through a special newsletter to sign up and announcing on my website to sign up? You should use affiliate such as you paid the member you recruit new member to use your site. 5. What should be the keyword that i should promote for the forum say for example, if my website had the primary keyword of "fashion model training" then what should be the primary keyword for my forum? The keyword is fashion,model,training.
I recommend phpbb. vBulletin costs money (wouldn't recommend a nulled version). Also, I noticed vBull still has many vuln's in it's code, while phpbb has quite less (and it's free!). SMF is horrible, and IPB is pretty lame too.