Can I earn Money by Starting a Forum?

Of course it's possible, but getting a forum going is usually quite hard unless you get really lucky. It's even harder to get the forum to be moderately popular. Installing a piece of forum software gets you nowhere. The larger players employ people specifically for the purpose of building community and nurturing the discussion. Community manager might be the job title.

I would not even think about something like this unless you already have an existing group of users, or the forum is a natural extension to a product or service that you're selling.

you can do it. but you relize that how to get traffic and user for your new network, forum
if you can solve it, your success is not far

Forum communities are money generating machines. But to start them and make it running is the hard part. As just like everyone said you will need a good number of members who can contribute to the community and bring other members to your board.
In the case of a forum content and sense of community is everything. The more the content the better it is and also sense of community is strongly needed. People should have believe that if they come and ask a query in your forum then their problem will be solved.

It sounds like a tough endeavor. Basically, I'm still learning to bring traffic (genuine traffic) to my website through SEO technique. Making a forum and keep it up can be a herculean task for me at this present stage of my expertise. I think I should wait while I learn more about SEO.

Install an AdSense plug-in to your forum, and visitors will start to click on ads. That will generate an income. Although it will take time to start making a great residual money, it is getting easier in time.

Forum can earn money but it depends from niche. There is some interesting CPA program which you can use on your board. It's good to have active and interesting community with forum.

Yes and what some of the others say. There can be big money in having your own forum but depends on niche and how you are monetizing it. If you have a very active niche forum you earn big bucks from advertisers who whats to buy spots but also from placing your own cpa and cps(affiliate) offers..

I don't know about programming languages. So, in order to develop a discussion board I firstly need to learn PHP and MYSQL. Then some designing skills like CSS. Upon completing the forum I then need to have members and enough traffic to make the forum monetized.

Honestly, starting a forum is a great way to get lots of traffic from the Search Engines and tons of repeat visitors coming back to you.

However, can you make money this way?

Absolutely but do NOT expect profits to come right away. Chances are you'll be operating at a loss the first 6 months to a year. This depends on a lot of different factors. How you monetize it etc.You really need to test out a few different monetization strategies when you've built your traffic up to a reasonable level.

You shouldn't be worrying too much about monetization right away though. You should focus on building a forum that will keep users coming back first and that creates a positive experience for the user.

This can be done by making sure that discussions get active enough, responses are fast, maybe add in some custom features that no other community has. Basically you'll need

Building a forum up to become popular is an uphill battle for the most part unless you already have an existing traffic source to tap into.

Personally, I wouldn't bother starting a forum unless I had a pre-existing traffic source first that I could use to give me a head start in building up the user count and activity.

Yeah of course definitely, but you have to watch it all over the time & you need to much of employees to build a strong network! Select the perfect niche first of all! Belongs to Business, Software, Social, Technology, Travel likewise!

Then you go with Adsense!

I'm planning to start a small forum with only few category to talk about. Then I'll see how well I'm able to manage its traffic. Only after its success I'll start making big forums like Warrior Forum.

I have a forum with about 2000 posts, it gets 80 visitors a day after 4 years, 1% go to my moneymaking page and 1% buy. So I make about 10 dollars every 5 month which pays for the domain registration. I was never able to make it popular.

Does Warrior Forum make money?

Of course your Forum will not be as successful as this one in day one or in quiet some time but if you serve a platform where people can get benefit from then the potential for forum earnings are very high. Just study your niche and see what people are buying and selling. Just my thoughts....

Since you know that the founder of warriors forum makes money every second through the traffics it generates, so why cant yours also pay? This actually requires your diligence, commitment and patience. I wish you the best.

It is good to start a forum and you can earn from it if you have high traffic

Beside WF, I knew a successful forum that earning from their traffic, it's http://www.webmastersun.com

I think you can learn more things by things they are doing on their forum.

Hope it helps!

Hi
Yes off course you can earn money to forum. And you can earn money easily through adsense . But it is depends upon trrafic. If traffic is high you can earn much money. But first you have to rank your forum in search engine then trrafic increase rapidly. And you want to rank your forum rapidly you have to make your site with the help of seo consultant your forum will rank very fast.