Article in Forum Building

Hundreds of forums out on the net are always looking for a way to expand and monetize their forums. However, many forums don’t make it after one month of being up. Some forums just don’t have that niche crowd that is attracted to their topic, or there are already many other forums just like it. No worries though, I’m about to guide you though some very good ways to monetize your forums.

• You must look at your forum and say to yourself, “My topic (for example), is World News.” From here, you must bring in a small but very active core group of members who will post on your forum. As long as your forum stays active between those core members, you’re making progress.

• Now that you have a good amount of members on your site, you must say to yourself, “What can I possibly do to attract a larger group?” First things first, you must come up with a very functional and developed design for your forums. A design which is attractive, appealing to the eyes, and easy to navigate through. Something which is unique will make your users feel like that are apart of something new and broad, which of course will only help you.

• Your forums must offer something fun or entertaining for your members, outside of posting. For example, if you have a Web design forum, you may want to put in a Marketplace. This marketplace will attract contractors who are in need of work, and it’ll also attract consumers who need work done. A heavy and active marketplace will lead to lots of traffic. Another example is if you have a design based forum. For that you could put up contests, having those designers create web templates and submit them for a weekly tournament. The winner would get a prize, and week after week, this process will continue. There are many, many options as far as what you can do to keep your members entertained, be creative. With this increase in traffic, many individual sponsors may ask to be advertised on your forums. This would be better for you than using Google Ad sense because you can charge your own rates per advertisement. It’s a much more efficient system.

• Now that you have some sort of entertainment down, you could look at the possibility of putting in shops. This is a great, great, way to make money. You could possibly have T-Shirts or Coffee Mugs which have your forum’s logo on it. If people buy anything, it’s straight profit for your website. Selling services or products will immensely help your profit chain.

• If you want to put up ads, you can put up ads in forum topics. Once the topic creator posts his topic, a post will appear directly under his in the topic, containing an ad. People will click those ads and you will be awarded money.

There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to figure out a solution for monetizing your forums. Be creative and different, and you may just be able to create an interesting forum enduring large amounts of traffic in which provides you a lot of revenue.