How Can You make Money From Forums ? (I Am Not Talking About WSO)

I have been on Digital point, submit express and romojunkie for approx two years. If you are talking about monetization in a form of query/leads and conversion they worked for me in my initial stage when I was not ranking for any keywords.
Now a day, most of traffic comes through search engines and a very little fraction through those sites.

In general, to sell your product on a forum, you must have a recognised presence and reputation on that forum.

The WSO forum is no exception. Plenty of people come here with great products full of great information, but they can't sell squat because they have no posts, no thanks, and a join date of last week.

This is, of course, unfair and on many levels just plain wrong. After all, do you know what I did to get my posts and thanks?

I sat around posting in a forum.

Now, unless you're paying me to teach you how to post in a forum (which I do teach, ironically enough), I suggest that maybe - just maybe - my post count and number of thanks are rather irrelevant to what I can teach you.

This is not to be confused with actually reading some of those posts and thinking someone knows a particular subject, or instructs others well, or even just has the right mindset. But similarly, if those posts aren't there, nobody can use those to figure you out.

Now, there is another thought process which isn't completely brain-dead, which is that after thousands of posts I must not be completely full of crap or I would have been chased out of the forum. And with hundreds of thanks, well, clearly other people must agree with me - after all, nobody thanks you for being full of crap.

But all the same, there are plenty of people out there who are very good at what they do and sell excellent products, and people here won't buy them because they don't have enough posts and thanks. You actually find the snide comments in their WSO threads: "oh, sure, you joined last month and all of a sudden you have a WSO; as if I'm going to fall for that."

It may not be right and it may not be fair, but there's no shortcut. You have to make participating in the forum part of your business, which automatically limits the number of places you can participate. After all, you only have so much time.

(Sometimes you can have reputation on one forum that carries over from another. The folks at, um, shall we say "naughty flame" may not see me post a lot over there, and they may not particularly care for this forum... but they do read it, and they do recognise me, and I do have a reputation over there. But I still have to prove that I "belong" in their company every time I go over there and talk to them.)

You can promote YOURSELF as an expert in a nich. When you become an authority people will buy your products.

If you want some short-term ways to monetize forums you can use your signature to promote cpa/aff/blogs etc.

If you want to sell your product on a forum that doesn't have something like WSO section you should contact the admin and ask him if you can do it. Usually it's best to offer the admin some % of your profit so You don't risk anything and admin promotes your thread because he wants to earn more