Building online forum as a business - cons
He is hardcore writer and each post on his blog is like an ebook which offers great, unique value to readers. [I tend to disagree with many of his posts and opinions, but who cares if Google loves you!]
Within years he created about 1000 posts in total.
Few years ago he launched a forum here: stevepavlina.com/forums
His forum generated close to 1 million of posts. The one would consider it as a big success - but apparently not!
Today he decided to shutdown forums for new posts completely - because "forum just became a distraction".
As Steve explained forum requires lots of resources to maintain it and police it and basically it is just a distraction from the main blog-based business.
He shares interesting inside-peek on cons of operating forum, especially valuable tips regarding ranking and SEO of forum vs. blog:
Forum Business
So, unless forum is specifically created as a business making tool - it's much easier to make money with just high quality blog!
Gleb
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