How much money do Forums make ?

[cityforums.com]

I am trying to compile a list of what popular Forums earn.

Can anybody share what you know ?

 

[labrocca]

PM me pcp the site and I'll give you my comments. I share some of my better forums with you too.

 

[BobTurker]

Forums are very tough to make money on for the reasons that have already been discussed. Maybe hard work will pay off, but a great bit of luck will help too.

 

[abdussamad]

How do you get the initial sign ups on a forum? It looks like labrocca is simply using his existing connections on other forums to promote his new forums. That's fine for him but doesn't work for those of us who are starting from scratch.

 

[labrocca]

How do you get the initial sign ups on a forum? It looks like labrocca is simply using his existing connections on other forums to promote his new forums. That's fine for him but doesn't work for those of us who are starting from scratch.

You can find sites with good natural traffic that fit the genre and use them to cross promote. If you spend $2500 buying smaller sites that might not even have forums it can benefit you greatly.

At one point I had 200 sites. Many I built myself and they had anywhere from 5-10 visits to 1000 visits per day. You point as many of them as you can to your site and you can build from that.

Marketing and SEO are very important. Every successful site needs a source for traffic. That's just reality.

 

[pcp]

could you explain microguy

Nobody could explain microguy.


J/K...

 

[abdussamad]

You can find sites with good natural traffic that fit the genre and use them to cross promote. If you spend $2500 buying smaller sites that might not even have forums it can benefit you greatly.

At one point I had 200 sites. Many I built myself and they had anywhere from 5-10 visits to 1000 visits per day. You point as many of them as you can to your site and you can build from that.

Marketing and SEO are very important. Every successful site needs a source for traffic. That's just reality.

Thanks for the insight. I see that a lot of time and money must be invested in promoting a forum.

 

[labrocca]

I see that a lot of time and money must be invested in promoting a forum.

Time is a factor for sure but money isn't neccessary imho. Money is just a way to save on time.

 

[dotker]

Forums are very tough to make money on for the reasons that have already been discussed. Maybe hard work will pay off, but a great bit of luck will help too.

its the easiest money to make on. image thousands of members trust you, you a part of their daily life & they grow by itself on time but forums are really hard to establish, it simply needs huge amount of time.

forum is like climbing a mountain you have to prepare yourself and it takes time and theres no stopping unless you have huge $$$ to pay for admins and mods.

 

[john645]

I will say this. Forums Can be am amazing income source. It all depends on the niche you are in, and how well you can monetize that niche. There are still plenty of new opportunities if you are on top of things. New Technologies, ideas and niches emerge on the scene every day. You just have to be fast to jump on it and create a community around it. Last Month I had over $120,000 in revenue from my sites. 95% of this was from forums.

I operate 3 main forums. 2 are in the top 10k in Alexa, while one is in the top 20k. Just to show you how different forums can be in terms of revenue depending on their topics. Two of these forums have the same amount of members and traffic, however the niches are totally different. One earns about $40k per month while the other earns about $2k per month.

98% of revenue is via Ads I sell myself, 1% from adsense, and 1% from subscriptions.

 

[cityforums.com]

Thanks for your replies everybody

 

[wussadotcom]

How do you get the initial sign ups on a forum? It looks like labrocca is simply using his existing connections on other forums to promote his new forums. That's fine for him but doesn't work for those of us who are starting from scratch.

labrocca mentioned about the combo blog and forum thing. Have you ever wondered why many forums do so or atleast have a landing page before a forum?
In my case I created the site based on a portal or blog based. When I stat to generate mid xx,xxx visitors then it was time to create my own forum.
Thats an alternative way to start a forum if you want to save a lot of money.
Usually requires around 6 month to develop the main site and gain all the traffic. Take note, natural traffic is the best and make sure that you have a mailing list or at least feedburner to keep your readers in touch.

 

[lantranhana]

Making money is not only possible, it's most likely - once you have a big board with lots of members. But - It's most unlikely to have such a big boad You can make money by doing this:
use Google Adsense. You'll notice 4 figure income once you have a board with thousands of members and put your ads on right place.
contract with online ad agencies that will give you online campaigns of larger companies (IBM, Microsoft). Notice that if you want to do that, your forum should not look like a forum. If it is a forum, most companies do not want to have their ads on your site.
Affiliate with companies that sell products your users like and will purchase online. Biggest affiliate company out there is amazon.com

 

[BionicMan]

Holy old thread bump Batman.