Making money on forums

burningwater

Banned
Mar 1, 2010
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Does any of you make any good money running forums? How do you do it?

It's seems that unless you have an enormous amount of members, it's hard to get sponsors and advertisers that pay anything.

Regardless, one good thing with a large user base is of course the opportunity to email them great offers they can't refuse ... ;)
A large list is always of great value.
 


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Thanks for the kind responses... ;)

For those who are interested, I have found a nice tool for increasing forum revenues called Driving Revenue. Check it out! I have no affiliation with them but I wish I did.
 
Forum is long term (I'm finally working on one myself). But I look at list building the same way. If you want big money 6-12 months from now. Paid traffic is the only way.
 
Thanks for the kind responses... ;)

For those who are interested, I have found a nice tool for increasing forum revenues called Driving Revenue. Check it out! I have no affiliation with them but I wish I did.

of course you don't.

If youre gonna spam at least be a bit imaginative.

jesus.

what a cockmuncher.
 
nkobend - you are way out to lunch - I am just sharing a tip and I am in no way related to Driving Revenue (if you want to check them out, just do a search and sign up - how in the hell would I benefit from that?). I just tried them for a website and it worked very well for my forum. I am sure some might find this hard to believe, but there are in fact people in this world willing to share a tip or two. Not a lot of them hang out here I guess.

The other thing I have experimented with is paid subscriptions. That can work too if the benefits are worth it - access to "special" forums, etc.
 
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of course you don't.

If youre gonna spam at least be a bit imaginative.

jesus.

what a cockmuncher.

DrivingRevenue was just acquired by VigLink... backed by Google.

I'm sure part of their marketing plan is to spam wickedfire

jesus.

what a cockmuncher.
 
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nkobend - you are way out to lunch - I am just sharing a tip and I am in no way related to Driving Revenue (if you want to check them out, just do a search and sign up - how in the hell would I benefit from that?). I just tried them for a website and it worked very well for my forum. I am sure some might find this hard to believe, but there are in fact people in this world willing to share a tip or two. Not a lot of them hang out here I guess.

The other thing I have experimented with is paid subscriptions. That can work too if the benefits are worth it - access to "special" forums, etc.

I still smell a rat, hit us with some details bro. ecpm? How much traffic you hitting your forum with each day? Sounds like a DP post but with better english to me. Way to general for my liking. details me!
 
Maintaining forums in the toughest task. Really hats of to the people who maintain these forums. Without traffic to their site they cannot even earn a penny.
 
^ It definitely can be, especially the part where you provide benefit and value before monetizing in any way just to attract a semi decent sized userbase, then actually monetizing it without pissing everyone off for making dough from their collective input and content... Having said that though, there's a lot of value in just networking, so owning a community (especially marketing/business related) does have its perks above and beyond making money from them or their clicks/eyeballs.

EDIT: Just monetizing a forum as an aff/vendor, only real way is to go direct and strike a deal w/the owners for media space, sponsored threads, cross promo discounts brand to brand etc. Black hat is another ball game I'm sure but yeah trying to just stick aff links on forums is rather pointless.

I will say that with my forum i don't bank from the members, but we all bank nice launch after launch as a team. Of course only the strong survive like with anything but the value in this specific scenario is having a huge base to pitch offers to as a vendor or group of vendors.

One last point: Tried to run a continuity forex program back in the day, it came with private access to a top traders forum that we started. It started off great, but back then the competitors in the fx niche were (are) fucking dirty, and our forum got attacked non-stop for a month or so straight with everything from injections, spam, illegal porn, 1000's of members seeded, no matter how tight we made the fucking ship we just got swampled by outsourced Russians and eventually traced the shit back to one of our rivals... closed the forum down altogether (This shit was part of a $250/month offer too). They just wanted us down, and had the resources to keep it up long enough to force us to close it/got sick of defense.
 
Running a forum sucks. I've been at it since... god about 3-4 years now.
If you wanna make money, learn other forms of marketing.
Forums are about community, not revenue.