Creating A Forum

Creating a money making forum can be one of the most difficult or easy internet marketing disciplines that there are.

First of all before you even start know this:

It can be very difficult to turn all of that forum traffic into cash. Usually it's only at the point where you can email your user database with a special offer that you can turn all of that server bandwidth into cold hard cash.

Adsense advertising on forums performs very poorly and you are limited in options to display alternative advertising/offers.

The way to start a forum is to do the following:

Create an adsense site as we discussed earlier. Then add on your reviews section. Once you have enough traffic you can add the forum and start working it daily.

If you start trying to build a forum before you have enough traffic then all that will happen is people see an empty space and fail to contribute.

The longer this goes on for the more people will be reluctant to contribute and it makes it ever harder to gain new users.

If you have the required amount of traffic - and the easy indicator for this is when the amount of emails regarding your site get to five or six a day then the job is a whole lot easier.

For building a forum you need the right software and whilst http://www.phpbb.com is GNU GPL and free http://www.vbulletin.com looks and feels much more like the real deal and this is what I recommend.

To build a forum you will need to have or know someone who has an appreciation of how to set up user permissions, groups and understands basic administration or you will get yourself into a mess. If you know someone who understands windows NT administration they'll have the basic skills needed to be able to do the job.

If you don't set the forum up properly with correct access permissions for unregistered users then you will become an easy target for spammers who will post trash if they are able to.

So, now we know what we want to achieve let's go and register a domain name.

What to build? - Forum Building