The Guide to Forums

Aug-20th-2008

By admin in Full Guides

Welcome to the Full Guide to Forums. In this guide, you’ll learn everything about forums, including how to run them well, how to advertise them and how to make money from forums.

It would be pretty surprising if you didn’t know what a forum was. For those who don’t however, it is basically an online discussion board where members can discuss various topics with each other, depending on what type of forum it is.

If you’re running a forum, there are some good ideas you could use to make your forum more active. For example, you could run contests on your forum every so often, and give good prizes out. Such competitions could involve posting competitions (Where the winner is the person who reaches xxx posts). Posting competitions are very common, and they are great for creating activity on your forum if you advertise it well. You could also add rewards for posting also. Try to make your forum as interesting as possible, this is probably the most important thing.

Forums are actually one of the most difficult types of websites to advertise. However, there are some ways you can generate traffic. The way to generate traffic can depend on the type of forum you’re running. If you register to forums that are related to the same type of content and then put a link in your signature (And maybe give a small incentive for registering, maybe an E-Book or a small amount of money) then you could find that this works. However, be careful not to blatantly advertising, forums don’t like advertising like that.

You could also try Social Bookmarking too. One tip that probably could work is one that has been discussed in another article. If you can find out about the latest news of something, you could make a thread about it on your forum. For example, a release of a new popular product that everyone uses. Once you’ve made this thread, you simply go to Digg and Stumbleupon, bookmark it, get some friends to do so too. If you’re like the first person to do so, then you should expect massive traffic to this one thread. You may find that some people want more of the same, so this is why they signup to your forum and become active. The only problem with this method is that being frontpage on Digg (If you make it) will use massive amounts of bandwidth, but it can be rewarding, especially if you have CPM advertising on your forum.

As mentioned previously, competitions work very well too. You could get a lot of extra visitors, signups and activity if you provide great prizes. You really need to spread the word about competitions though, you wouldn’t want to give away an iPod if three people participated and made 50 posts each. Another type of contest that has proved to work well is the Referral Contest. This is where users compete with each other to refer the most users to your forum. You could get their referrals to make at least, say, 10 posts too to be counted as a referral. If you spread the word enough, this should work out very well.

You could also buy direct advertising space on other forums related to your content. Seek out other popular forums like yours and see if any of them allow advertising on their forum. If you can find one that is cheap and gets many visitors, you may see that a section of these visitors and signup onto yours too. If you can’t, you could easily try advertising on a Pay-Per-Click Program like Google Adwords. This could work out cheaper, but it might not be as effective.

Now how to make money from forums. Making money from these is considered very difficult. There isn’t many methods available for forums, and even some forms of advertising programs aren’t effective. A lot of traffic from forums come from visitors who come to your website very often, which means that they know where your advertisements are and will never click them, they just ignore them. This is why Pay-Per-Click advertisements is very ineffective, because everyone just ignores them and views the information. Luckily, there are two forms of advertising that do work pretty well.

First of all, CPM advertising works well on forums that are popular. Since CPM works based on the number of impressions the advertising gets, it doesn’t matter if people just ignore the advertising, because you’ll still make money from them. If your forum is getting a lot of traffic, you could make a fortune from these. However, the only problem is that on a general note, CPM doesn’t pay that good. For example, you could probably expect an average rate at $0.50 to $0.75 per 1,000 impressions. Of course there are ones that pay higher. This is why CPM advertising isn’t that effective either if your forum doesn’t get much traffic.

Second of all, direct advertising can work well on forums too. This is just like CPM too - It depends on the number of visitors you get. If your forum gets little traffic, then nobody will want to pay you for an advertisement on your forum. However, you can expect a lot of revenue if you do get visitors. Make sure you make an advertising page on your forum providing information.

In conclusion, forums are difficult to make money from, especially if you have little traffic. It can be rewarding if you get traffic, though. In general, forums are difficult to work with. You should try to build traffic through competitions, other forums and Social Bookmarking. Earn revenue through advertisements.

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