Can forum makes money?

This is the one of the most asked question by any forum administrator newly entered into world of message boards. To get the answer of this question I myself researched on various issues, read many forum success stories and different possibilities of earning money through forum. Though I saw most of the forum administrators did not succeeded in earning from forums however there are also many forum success stories which can inspire those who didn’t have the way for making some good bucks. Let me start from the start by asking some questions.

What is your aim before making a forum?

If making money is the only aim you have then better don’t start forums. The first most important thing which comes before starting any community forum is your (Administrator’s) passion and interest on that particular subject or niche of which you are intended to start a community forum. Money won’t start falling from sky as soon as you start a forum.

How much active are you on your own forum?

Notice your own activity and contribution to forum. By contribution I mean to say “making content”. How often you write on your forum? Because, without content no one will going to take pain to see or check your forum even though you invested 100 or 1000$ on forum software, modifications or forum skin/theme. And note this word that without traffic to your forum you can’t even think of earning.

Do you have an Adsense account?

From many years Adsense is a blessing to millions of webmasters and website owners around the globe to get very fair revenue from there respective website, it’s a product of Google and better known as Google Adsense. Its simple to understand that Google will put ads relevant to your forum niche on your message board and will pay you every time the ads get click by the user or visitors to your site. Make sure that click should be genuine and strictly not by you, for sure Google is smarter then you. To get more detailed information check out www.google.com/adsense

How to get traffic to your forum?

As said above without traffic your dream of earning could not be fulfilled and to build traffic the first and most important thing is making good informative and useful content. The second thing is generating traffic and there are many effective ways to do that, some easiest ways are

• Join many different community forums and start putting your own forum URL on the signature of those communities if the owner/admin allows you and most of the time no one has any issue with that. This will help you generating traffic to your forum in 2 different ways, 1^st it will get noticed by the members of those community and 2^nd is spiders of those community forums will put your signature link on search engines. It won’t work unless you post good and quality threads or topics on those forums too, as much as you can.

• There are hundreds of free forum directories where you can submit your forum link and description, its really work well in generating traffic.

• Social networking sites can help you in generating a mass of people on your community board but it need a very fair trick, don’t spam people with “request to join your forum” or an “irritating advertisement” the best way is take help from your friends on those social networking sites first. Then the other way is making a community or group dedicated to your forum where you can ask people to join those groups and talk about your community or can ask any questions regarding your community forum. Win there trust and they will join your message board.

• Social bookmarking is really a very good way in generating very genuine and interested people you can use your own way but I suggest you to start a simple blog on blogger.com which is free and write useful and informative articles about your community forum, your goal and keep on updating that blog as your official forum blog and submit those articles to social bookmarking sites like dig.com. squidoo.com, technorati.com, blogcatalog.com, propeller.com, stumbleupon.com.

When I will get my 1^st Adsense check?

Not after a week or 2 but could take months, I don’t want to discourage you but if you know how to do business then you very well know that profit don’t start coming on the next day of your business, you should be patient and keep up your spirit and passion so your forum members will also not loose there interest on your newly started community.

I tried to cover all basic, most important and necessary points to get earnings from community forum for newbie forum administrator. To repeat in simple points it would be like this

1. Content
2. Promotion/Marketing
3. Google Adsense
4. Building traffic ( Signature link, Directories, Social networking, Social bookmarking, Blog)

For some more advance users there are many other ways like Google adwords, affiliate marketing, text link ads, link exchange etc which I will try to cover in my next article on Can forum makes money-2

For an inspiration I would like to recommend you this link where you can find many real success stories of forum administrators and my favourite among all is Lee Dodd so don’t forget to read Lee’s success story.