You Want To Monetize Your Forum In The Right Way

New forums are popping up around the net all the time, adding to the thousands of forums out there already. Many of them will never make it past a few months, while some of them become pillars of the ever growing Internet community.

Now onto the first dilemma, getting people and getting them to talk. People don't like to join empty forums so you will need to get a few friends together and start posting topics others would be interested in talking about.

When your forum is small, you really need to target a niche and get a good core group of regularly posting members. With many huge forums out there you are not likely to succeed with a broad forum. You can always expand later when your users ask you to. Start small with quality content, or if you already have a forum scale it down and find a target group.

If you are good with code or graphically inclined, you should spend some time customizing the forum so people feel like they are part of something special. You need to invest some time into making your forum look professional and inviting to people in your target niche. If you already have a forum maybe it is time for a makeover. Our visual sense is our strongest sense so a redesign will make a big difference.

Every website needs traffic and everybody talks about how to get traffic so we won't dwell on it too much. We'll look at how to turn that traffic into cash instead. Now that you have a core group of users and your forum is looking it's best, let's see if we can squeeze some ads in there.

Affiliate banners such as Adsense probably won't make you money unless you have massive amounts of traffic. Since you're targeting a specific niche of people you will have an easier time to find individual sponsors. You can use something like Adbrite, where individual sponsors will sign up for your site. Or Commission Junction, where you can pick specific sponsors or you can implement a custom php solution, whatever you think might work best.

An even better way to make money is if you can directly sell services or products to your members. For example, a forum talking about web hosts can offer web hosting directly, a forum talking about travel can offer downloadable wall papers and so on.

So, try to target your forum at a specific niche, get a core group together and start producing some valuable content. If you start seeing an increase in your traffic you can start looking for advertisers or establish services for sale or get a product line together.

Comments? Questions? Email Here

© HowtoAdvice.com

How to Advice .com