Anybody Have Experience Building and Monetizing Forums?

[FederalChickadee]

Apologies if there's an appropriate spot for this post.

But I bought a domain with a decent number of backlinks, and started to rebuild a forum on it. The niche is kinda low competition according to my research today. And I wanted to pick the brains of folks out there who have experience doing this.

I started adding content myself today, and my hope is to recruit some mods to help me manage. And collect more data to post.

I went with phpBB for the software, and bought a theme for it so it wouldn't look like it was programmed in 2003.

How does someone build (or in my case rebuild) a forum with a niche community from scratch?

 

[Deleted member 731332]

I built a forum in 2012. Mostly low comp informational/diy intent. There were a couple of other forums just like mine and some Subreddits. All the same stuff. I just joined those, made friends, and brought them over. They started posting links for me on the other website and subreddits especially after I got them to post content on my website.

Ranking for thousands of low comp keywords will bring new members as well. Guests buy stuff too.

I abandoned that forum after 9 years and 11 months.

 

[awesomewebsites]

I built a forum in 2012. Mostly low comp informational/diy intent. There were a couple of other forums just like mine and some Subreddits. All the same stuff. I just joined those, made friends, and brought them over. They started posting links for me on the other website and subreddits especially after I got them to post content on my website.

Ranking for thousands of low comp keywords will bring new members as well. Guests buy stuff too.

I abandoned that forum after 9 years and 11 months.

Why did you abandon it instead of selling it ?

 

[Deleted member 731332]

Why did you abandon it instead of selling it ?

I turned much of the content written by myself and other people into an ebook. I still make money on that everyday. The domain is for sale. If no one buys it soon I’ll repurpose the domain.