Quote:
Originally Posted by Blastyourass
I have been wanting to do a forum for my one of my content sites and was wondering if this is your only source of income or a side job? Second how is it running a forum and is it monetizable (meaning worth the work)?
I noticed you do have activity there and your site is very polished and professional. My fiancee actually liked it (new parents) so that was cool.
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Two things for ya, Moe. This will save you a lot of heartache later.
1. Only add a forum if you know people are dying for one. You don't want to babysit and incubate it because, and BlondeTM says, the return for that work won't be worth it. If you didn't already have a content site, I would suggest only starting with a blog - with expert guest posters from the niche even - and once you start getting 20-30 comments per post, you have the starting of a seedling community. But since you already have a site, I would say that you are the best judge of the traffic and amount of interactivity with readers.
2. Keep the focus on your content site. Advertisers don't always feel good about forums. They know that forum users are far less likely to click on ads (or even notice them), but also many have concerns about their brand showing up next a post about somebody hating their brand. One thing we are working on changing on
our site is taking forum content out of the forum to create more static pages (well really, they will just *look* more static). (If you didn't already have a content site, I would have said to only have the forum as an aside - not as the main focus.)
You CAN monetize forums, but you will work harder for that money. Is your content site product or brand-based? That will help you tremendously!
Hope that helps,
Laura