Forum's Flipping?Success?

Yep, my forum @ Sitetalkzone.com in November went for $1,500 cash and a equity deal. Totally around $2,000.

It was a 1.5 month old forum, with around 10,000 posts, 400 members, 1,000 threads, 300 uniques a day, 90k Alexa, some ad spots were sold.

I didn't do any promotion myself.

I sponsored a contest on a pretty popular blog [Rajaie's] around $75, and it gave me 70% of the stats I told ya' above. Then the rest was fulfilled by my contest.

Overall, a $500 or so investment, $1,000+ in profits.

To be honest, forum(s) can be a bit hard to take off, specially when there are so many already in your niche. Some tips:

- Use ways to funnel other site's traffic to yours. I paid $75 to Rajaie (indirectly) for around 200 uniques a day, at the end of the day, a pretty good deal.

- Grab your visitors attention on the first look, and then make it easy for them to register. In my case, people loved the simplicity of the theme and the big notice of the contest going on made them register.

- Have ideas to monetize it. A paid subscription maybe, an upgrade to a better level of membership, paid marketplace? Something on those tracks do well.

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After you have revenue and userbase growin' exponentially, it becomes a lot easier to sell. There are so many selling points there.

I've flipped a couple of forums but never really make forum flipping something that I do constantly.

I've started a couple of soccer forums and promote it through blog commenting and promote on other soccer forums. My idea is to get as many members as possible and that's it. I didn't monetize my forums much (only with AdSense) and didn't bother to focus on profitability.

Both of my forums went for $300 each with about 60 members and powered by SMF which is free.