Forum Moderators: skibum
I was thinking about creating a forum site. Do you think I could make some decent affiliate money with rotating banners at the top and an individual forum that announces new products? Or would that put off the community too much? Any comments welcome.
Forums are good as a supplement to a website but by themselves, they generally cost more than they bring in for revenue.
But unless you can generate 1,000s of visitors a day forget it.
1 secret is to start a forum in a smaller niche where few quality boards exist, then advertise like mad, spend lots of money and create the best forum in that market to make your site where everyone who wants to learn about those obscure widgets goes to advertise the widgets your forum discusses. At the start, be prepared to ask and answer all your questions with several different aliases’ to build conversations and topics. Not a lot of fun but if you like to write go for it.
But I think the highly targeted forum with lots of traffic is one of the best money makers out there.
Affiliate programs have never made me enough on the site to justify the time and effort of adding the code. The one exception to that is the Tire Rack program. I have had an excellent experience with them.
My income comes almost completely from direct advertisers. It took a long time to get the attention of direct advertisers. The only reason that it is successful for me is that my members all go to car shows and order things from vendors in my arena. They are my sales people. I constantly get emails from vendors who have heard about the site from members. We also do a lot of real world gatherings and try to get magazine coverage as often as possible.
The Google Adsense program has also added a nice revenue stream at zero cost to me and very little effort. I highly recommend it.
We integrated affiliate ads about a month ago and it's been going well. When I say going "well", it's enough to keep them open, but never anything I would have done as a money making venture.
We have a passion for the subject matter on the forums, so yes, that makes it worthwhile.
Can anyone describe their experience and success rate at creating puppet conversations in any sense of user interaction on their site? Feel free to comment on whether you consider this an ethical method of development.
phil
Yes, to get your forum going you may need to create phantom conversations unless you have lots of friends who also are interested in the subject. In which case you can recruit them to your forum.
There is nothing worse than a forum that appears to be dead. In our case, it didn’t take long for people to beginning making the first post, but it took over 10 months to get others to want to continue a treat. It was up to me to be more than one person until some other regulars started hanging out and getting involved. One thing I’ve done is that when someone starts to get involved, I drop them an email thanking them and telling them how important there contributions are.
