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How Would You Like To Earn A Substantial Amount Of Money From Your Forum?

Every single day people are trying to figure out how they can make money online, if only they realized how easy it was, they would probably be kicking themselves right now! You can actually start earning money on a forum! Yep, it's true, you can earn money several different ways on a forum, either a new or an old one. I actually prefer starting from scratch and would advise you to try this out with a clean slate but really you can try whatever you want and do it however you want to do it!

Obviously forums are a HUGE part of the Internet, there are well over millions of them available all over the place, in every single category and niche you can think of such as; sports, gaming, electronics, art, celebrities, outdoors, travel, cooking, etc. These sites are plentiful because there are so many different types of people online, from age, creed, sex, nationality and interests which is why even if you build a brand new forum and market it, masses of people will join it, which is obviously what you want. For the most part making money on a forum isn't an instant money maker, first you need to design it, host it, get the topics together, and then of course, get people to join it.

But for the most part sites like Warrior Forum, Name Pros, and Site Point make thousands a dollars a month off of their forums and you can too, once you receive a certain amount of people. Usually I don't like to introduce ads until about a thousand members because then people think "hm, this site is all about the ads". And people don't like being sold on the spot. Give it some time. Let your backlinks flourish with article marketing, directories, blogs and advertising. Once you reach about 500 members or so, you can then introduce ads and other money making strategies. Some of these strategies are listed below, in no particular order.

- AdSense - You can place ads on your site, have it be contextual or otherwise. When people click these ads you will be paid a certain "affiliate" commission. There are some people out there making thousands of dollars a month just on AdSense alone, so this is a great idea that is not only quick but easy.

- Google makes all the ads for you, all you have to do is customize them and to place them on your website. Simple stuff.

- CPM banners - These are banners from CPM (click per thousand) that you can place on your websites. Now depending on what type of CPM site it is, you will either get paid per click or per action. If you get paid per click then you will receive a percentage per every click. If its a pay per action then all you have to do is get people to "view" the ad on the page it's on. Notice on most CPM programs, the click is worth more than the view because anyone can get a view! These banners can be relevant or irrelevant to your website, again it depends on the website you use! In some cases they will let you customize your campaign and pick the category of the banner. If you have a gaming forum, place gaming ads. If you have a cooking forum, place food ads.

- Affiliate link - Links can be placed anywhere on your forum, as long as they follow the regulations and rules of the website your getting the ads from. I link to join affiliate hubs like Amazon, Linkshare and Kolimbo, because they have a huge amount of affiliates available right in their network and everything is organized. When you belong to an affiliate program like Amazon, Linkshare or Kolimbo, you can be an affiliate with as many companies/businesses as you want. There isn't a limit. But more often than not I find it a good idea to focus on no more than 3 brands/products/services. After you get over three it just becomes more work. And if your can't figure out how to make money on three, how in the world will you be able to make money on 30? Its common sense. Only do as many as you can do while making profits in the process.

- Membership Fees - Obviously I wouldn't charge a fee right off the bat, instead make it so everyone can join for free, but that they can only go to certain parts of the website. I know of one website which has free memberships, but if you want to visit say, the download section, you have to pay a membership fee. Obviously this section needs to be incredible because you really don't want your members to feel cheated but also because you want to give them a reason TO upgrade and TO pay TO visit that section. You can also make members pay per thread. Obviously don't do this for every thread on the forum because it's not viable and it's also not very fair.

Instead, make them pay a fee to post a thread in a special section like the service or marketplace area. Some sites charge $10, some sites charge $20. But really if you think about it, you can use the fees for threads as profit or as a terrific way to make money for hosting, which on some servers can get expensive, especially if you have 500,000 members that are active!

- Banner Space / Sponsor Ads - Personally I wouldn't offer this service and one of the other banner options at the same time because A) the member who bought the space could as well feel that peoples attention is diverted away from his or her ad, but also because too many ads leads to less members. Ads can sometimes get annoying when forum owners go overboard. So just make sure you pick a happy medium. You can charge people X amount of dollars per day/week/month/year and let them place one of their text links, or banners on your site (where space is available aka ad space).

I don't recommend starting a forum solely for making money off of itself. You have to be interested and passionate about your forum and then when people see that enthusiasm behind it, they would be much more willing to join, however, it is a good way to make money once you start receiving enough members and enough posts. Remember a forum can have 100,000 members, but if there are only 2 posts, people are probably going to wonder what's up.

Some people make the mistake of trying those services like Forum Booster which makes you pay X amount of dollars to receive membership sign ups. Listen if you are going to do something like this, I would say pay for posts, not members. Members won't bring more members (who are active) but helpful non spammy posts will bring more members and make more people want to post, plus this is a good way of getting your forum indexed by Google, Alexa, and Yahoo bots!

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