wheel - 12:58 pm on Oct 17, 2011 (gmt 0)

I want to build community around quality content and expect that community to contribute content in discussions. Yes of course I want to make money out of it. But I want to do some quality work.

I think what a few of us are saying is that you should already know what topic, because it's a topic you know about or are passionate about. The topic should be obvious to you. Then people can advise how to grow it or monetize it.

In terms of using the community idea to build traffic, I expect that's a huge hurdle. Forums have always been extremely tough to build - far more fail than succeed, and it's a two year timespan of hard work before you have anything remotely stable. And with all the social media platforms, I'd be very apprehensive about building something that requires community input.

I might consider a blog if I was expert on something, because then it's not quite as dependent on others, and there's more control.