Does anyone have experience creating their own forum?

How can a forum be monetised?? Why dont you lookat warrior forum? Adverts... memberships ... paid posts

Hi - My advice may or may not be relevant to you depending on your niche (ie. you may not have the same problems as me).

I do have experience starting a forum. About 18 months ago I also found a niche based on a conversation I heard on a radio show. I had no idea what they were talking about and came home and googled it. Then of course like all IM'ers, I had to go look at number of searches and keyword competitiveness ... lol, can't we lead normal lives.

I started a forum and use Google Ads to get people on to it...this was the toughest part. I tried some paid forum posting for the first 50 users just so a blank forum didn't greet people when they arrived. Nobody wants to come to the empty forum.

Fast forward and the forum caught on like wild fire. In 18 months I've amassed over 90k members, 30k visitors per month, and over 12 million page views per month, with over 300 new members daily. Great? Well, yes and no.

My forum demographic is 90% US, between ages 16-28. Because sometimes the conversation will turn to something about say, drugs, or maybe even sex, I'm unable to use Google Ads on it. I tried and it ran for about a week and then I go a message saying they don't allow ads on sites that have this type of content. It really wasn't about that content, but yes, sometimes you'd have posts about it...its a forum after all.

And I've continued to have the same problem with many ad networks...so in my particular case, advertising hasn't been that lucrative. I now have some ad networks but it's only bringing in around $600 a month. This may be completely irrelevant for your niche however, but just consider if you will fall into this.

I've tried monetizing through affiliate advertising with no real success - which may be to my incompetence...who knows.

I have not yet tried monetizing the list...That is, I have a 90k member list grown by about 300 a day...in theory I should be able to monetize that but who knows.

Finally, one thing to think about...your server costs for a forum are much higher than a wordpress site, especially when you grow. A wordpress site is practically static and can be heavily cached. A forum is constantly having data written to it so the requirements become more. I rapidly went from shared to VPS to a stronger VPS to dedicated to a stronger dedicated.

So this was a really long winded post - basically, yes, you can monetize a forum from on-page ads, affiliate links, paid support (which I do too), your mailing list etc. I much prefer a forum to the standard funnel type site that you're constantly trying to drive traffic too...a forum, once it starts to grow, just keeps getting bigger with more and more SEO content. I just hope your niche is better than my niche in terms of monetization

Good luck!

I know one guy had to hire a few VA's to just create fake accounts to do fake "talk" for months to get it going while it was being promote. Problem is no one will join the forum if no one is there and active. CATCH 22.

But huge profit if you get it going.

It's hard to kickstart a forum, I've tried a few times. The initial launch usually brings about quite a bit of traffic and the forum blows up in conversation from the excitement but after a few weeks it starts dying really fast too.

As mentioned before, you may have to resort to paid posters to keep it alive while it grabs more momentum. It won't be cheap, but I believe having an active forum opens up a lot of opportunities for $$$.

It all depends on why you're starting a forum. If your primary goal is to make money, there are many easier ways to accomplish that. One thing is certain: if you keep at it and it becomes popular, the beast will swallow more and more of your free time as it grows. You should be really enthusiastic about the subject matter, otherwise the pain increases proportionally...

Matthew Woodward has an article about this on his blog I think…

Award Winning Internet Marketing Blog - Matthew Woodward

Yes.

I've run forums.

They've gotten hacked as well.

It takes a HUGE amount of time/sock puppets to get things going. You can monetize them well, mind you, by getting folks on mailing lists and using vbulletin mods/etc....

But for me personally, it's 'way too much work these days.

Here's some other resources:

10 Ways To Monetize a Forum

https://www.americanexpress.com/us/s...ize-your-blog/

Best of skill!

I had a couple of forums several years ago and both were doing pretty well. But those niches were seasonal so I sold both forums.

Forums are a great tool to have discussions with other readers through the internet about any particular topic. Anyone who wants to talk with their friends, make their own community, or own their very own website may want to setup their own forum. However, you may think that it is impossible to set one up as you have no clue about how to create a website, but don’t worry, here are 5 sites that allow you to easily create your own forum.


1) Forumotion : MakeUseOf has covered Forumotion before, and one of the good things about Forumotion is that you get to choose from 4 different forum platforms. These include: phpBB2, phpBB3, punBB, and Invision. You can also customise your forums with over 3000 themes. There is also a large list of subdomains that you can choose from to match the type of forum that you want to host. But if you don’t want to go down the path of a subdomain, Forumotion allows you to purchase your own domain through the forum’s admin interface.
Forumotion also offers a number of features:
-The ability to send newsletters to forum members
- Invite your friends using contacts from your social media accounts and webmail accounts
- Able to install modules such as Portals, Blogs, Galleries, Point System, Roleplay Games, Chatbox and a Calendar
- Forum statistics and reports
- Instant account creation

2) Free Power Boards and Free Forums is another great forum provider that offers an great range of features. However, only phpBB is available. They offer a number of upgrades that you can add to your board such as domain names, the removal of ads and copyright banner. However, these all come at a cost. The features are very similar to those of Forumotion such as a custom admin panel, over 150 different styles, a large range of forum mods, a recovery console, and 24/7 support. Visit the Free Forums Features Page for all the features that they offer.
The mods that you can install on your forum are:
- Activity Stats
- AJAX Chat
- Arcade
- Birthday
- Calendar
- Contact Page
- Image Resizer
- Inactive Member Reminder
- iPortal
- No Ads For Staff
- New Profile System
- Quick Reply
- Share This
- Show Topic in View Online Page
- Thanks Mod
- Welcome PM

3) Lefora offers a unique forum experience with the ability to add sidebar widgets and much more. Lefora offers the following features when you use it to create your own forum:

- Facebook, Twitter and MySpace integration
- WYSIWYG editor
- 10GB of bandwidth
- Spam detection
- Newsletters
- Statistics
- Chatbox
- Avatars
- Games
- Email notifications

4) phpBB doesn’t offer anything special compared to the sites above, but if you want a basic version of phpBB3, then phpBB Host is for you. If you can put up with the large banner that’s placed on your forum and love the unlimited bandwidth, members and posts, you can’t go wrong with phpBB Host.
Other features include:
- Attachment quota of 500MB
- Custom domain
- Over 40 different styles
- 24/7 forum tech support
- Forum import ability
- Ads

There are also a number of mods that you can install as well such as:
- Post count requirement
- Welcome PM
- Top posters
- Manage attachments
- Quick Reply
- ACP notepad
- Custom Portal

5) Pro phpBB is very similar to phpBB Host as you just get the phpBB3 forum with nothing extra. Pro phpBB doesn’t offer anything fancy, but doesn’t seem to have the obtrusive ad that phpBB Host has. If you just want the basic phpBB3 forum without the hassle of installing it on your own server, Pro phpBB is for you.

I loved phpbb2 since you can find a ton of hacks for it. When I last tried phpbb3, it was still fairly new and weren't as robust as its predecessor, but it was also a lot more streamlined and was designed to be more accommodating to mods. Never been a big fan of vB.

If you've never run a forum before, phpbb3 is a great option and runs well out of the box.

I have built several forums that have generated money. The content of that forum matters more than just placing ads all around the site.

BTW, just a caution to some of the free hosted forums. Read the ToS CAREFULLY! Some of them do not allow you get at your raw data. So when your forum gets successful, you're stuck with them. You're far better offer installing an open source one on your own domain.

Full time job monitoring it.

I created forum once...I got too much spam post then I closed it..

I recently sold a forum for over 15k that I spent no more than maybe 200 hours on. The secret is to a) find something people are passionate about. It must be controversial in some way. Then people will volunteer to moderate and run the forum for free. That's how I managed to grow it without spending any real time. Then B) you use the forum as a way to grow your e-mail list.

There is a catch here. To get things rolling fast you need someone to blast your forum's URL to a large e-mail list. Sitting around waiting for people to join hpis always a failed strategy.