Make Money with Forums

Most people understand the basics of websites and generating visitors. You must have good content that people are happy to read and will believe. It is important that you keep your website updated too. The easiest way to do this is by creating a community where the trick is to get people to create the content for you instead of you doing it yourself.

I am sure that there are a lot of you who have heard about the awesome power of having an online forum community. A community helps you to generate revenue, rank better on search engines like Google, provide a better service to the visitors and increase traffic through repeat visitors who constantly come back to read more. With lots of information and discussion being exchanged in your forums visitors will return again and again to see replies to their posts, read others posts and basically to see if anything has changed or if opinions have swayed to their side.

It can be a place for people to discuss issues, share knowledge and an ideal place to promote your products and your services through method like affiliate marketing and so on.

The very first thing to do is to decide a niche topic for your forum. This will attract your core audience to discuss about a certain topic of interest. Do not add many sub forums that are not relevant to the main topic as this will dilute the credibility of your forum.

When starting up the first technical thing to consider is the platform for the forum. There are so many forum scripts you can choose from. I would suggest you to start off with a free forum script that has the feature to ‘migrate’ forum information to another forum script at any point in time. Start off with the free SMF forum script. This is the most powerful free script available. Even most web hosts have it as a part of their package. Do check with your web host if the script is available before downloading another one and using it.

The next step is, depending on your budget to start off with, do a search on Google for the keyword: “Cheap Web Hosting”. With the results, make a few decisions and look for a good deal on your web hosting. A tip here, never make the mistake of starting a forum off with free hosting. You will have tons of advertisements on your site that will annoy your members and ultimately make them leave. You want the ability to place the advertisements yourself so you can control what your visitors see and also earn the extra from the advertisement. Always select a web host within your budget, and make sure that the host you select allows you to run forums. Start off with at least 20GB of space and 500 GB bandwidth which goes for about USD$100 per year.

Once you have everything up, you should now expect visitors to join as a member! If you have no visitors or members, your forum will never grow, it has to be started. Start off with the forums that all you to advertise your forum or website. Digital point is a good community to start with as is Warriors Forum too. Add a link to it in your signature where the forum users there can also offer their opinions at your. Your signature will appear on all your posts instantly along with all the rest of the future posting that you might make. Make sure you are always active even if no one posts anything that day. Once members start joining in and are active make them moderators of sub communities. This will make them feel like they are part of your forum community and also drive them to post more and take active interest in your forums.

You must also make the registration process an easy as possible as people aren't going to join if they've to fill out a long form which asks for every single detail. Just ask for username, name and email address for a start. Leave the rest blank so if the user feels inclined he/she can fill in the rest at a later date.

You need people in your forum and you need them to be talking about things that will get others to join in. Namely, you need interesting things that people are interested in talking about. People don’t like to join empty forums so you will need to get people together and start posting topic others would be interested in talking about. You need to invest some time into making your forum look professional. Getting people to post in your forum is probably the hardest thing to do and will be the greatest hurdle before you get things going.

First thing to realize is that not all of your readers will post messages. In fact, only a small percentage will post regularly, and most will never post at all, they just like reading. A great way to get people to start talking is by starting contests. Put the contest details in on the main page or post it as a global announcement with a sticky. You can offer them free software or even cash. I have seen forums offering some cash gift for people with highest posts every week and they do work well. It works very well and really does get the posting going. A tip to remember is this, getting people posting is much like a forest fire, its hard to start but once it going it really going!

When it comes to sorting out your forum, you should start your forum with less than 5 categories so people can talk broadly about the subject first, then slowly expand and create more categories when the number of members increases. This way, the forums does not look so empty. You should also consider the use of the polling features of SMF software to your advantage. You can ask your members some questions and get their opinions using polling software too.

If you have a forum with a decent traffic then you may find that you can sell advertising space through private ads or even sign up with Ad aggregators like Adsense of Clicksor. You can put some adverts like Google Adsense on your forum in such a way that it does not affect the forum navigation. An even better way to make money is if you can directly sell services or products to your members. For example a forum on web hosts can offer web hosting directly. You can send newsletters to forum members with special offers and only available to them. Do not send emails every day otherwise they will leave your forum. These are quickest and easiest ways to turn your forum into a money making success.