Is there room for an Internet Marketing forum?
As you mentioned there are quite a few forums already dominating the IM niche, but if you base your forum on a specific sub niche (blackhat seo tools, blacklink building methods etc...) then I think you could dominate that sub niche and overtime if your forum became popular you could takeover the bigger niches also.
Would I be able to make $50 a day in 6 months?
It depends how many hours of work you mean by 6 months - part time? full time? 1 hour a week? If you worked 20+ hours a week then yes, I would say that's a realistic goal and it's more than possible.
Is it worth starting up a Internet Marketing forum?
Unless you are willing to put in an insane amount of work then no. As far a making money there are many other methods that requires less investments. If you do put in the time though it can definitely be worth it, just think how much the owners of Blackhatworld make.
Wait about a week or so, I can nearly guarantee that it's a temporary desire and the urge to start a forum will disappear. If however, you are completely sure that this is what you want, then be prepared to put in allot of time and money. Forums are like babies, they require constant attention and work. Writing, promoting and administrating is all you'll be doing for the first couple of months with very little success. If you want to create your own forum then keep on reading because I wrote a guide for you, I created my own forum in the IM niche using this exact method:
My Forum Blueprint
To start off I would recommend creating the forum using MyBB because it has a great community, customizable themes, lots of plugins and it's open source. Create a good system where members get rewarded to post and where quality is encouraged. Also try and implement spam filters, if you don't you'll get hundreds of inactive members and Viagra posts. Create a customized theme (the default MyBB themes are horrible), it's pretty easy if you have basic CSS knowledge, otherwise outsource it.
The next step is to try and get members and fill your forum with high quality content. Nobody is going to join and inactive forum, so in the beginning I would recommend either making accounts and posting yourself or hiring people to be active on the forum, just go on odesk/elance and post a job. Make sure all the posts are high quality, intelligent and entertaining which will actually help the reader and encourage him/her to join.
A good method to get members is to drive traffic to your forum. To do this I would try to rank the posts in Google for certain keywords. Lets say you get 200 unique visits a day from Google to your high quality and informative posts, and a modest 2 percent of visitors sign up, that's 120 real members a month. After a while you won't need fake accounts and hired posters because people will be voluntarily posting for free. Then the snow ball effect will kick in and after a while the numbers of members and posts will grow with little effort. This is when your baby has finally turned into a man and the results are evident haha.
Quality is hard to manage and posts become hard to control when your community takes off. This is when it's highly recommended you start choosing professional moderators. You want a system such as Stackoverflow where quality posts/replies are rewarded and one worded posts/replies are looked down upon or removed completely. This is why Stackoverflow is one of the most successful websites in the world, they encourage quality while pushing the least voted answers to the bottom of the page.
In general forums have a vibe of sharing and giving to the community to better the internet without charging a dime, so monetizing forums are kind of difficult. Apparently forums have really bad ad click rates (0.5%) due to members subconsciously training their minds to avoid certain areas of the page. Blackhatworld makes money through renovating advertising space and through donations, implementing a similar system would be a good place to start.
I built a blackhat forum a couple of years ago which was created based on a temporary desire, after a month or so I no longer felt the urge to maintain it so I moved on. I wish I would have waited to save me the lost investments. In that month of work I spent about 200+ hours and $1,000 of investment into the forum. I outsourced about 10 full time workers to interact with each other and post on my forum in an intelligent and informative manner. I was getting about 100 visits a day from ranking in Google and quite a few real members were posting. I had about 40 active members and 2,000 posts/replies (most of them were outsourced). It could of kept on growing, but the time and money just wasn't worth it in my opinion.
If you have any questions I'll do my best to answer. If you choose to create a forum then let me know, I would be happy to watch the progress and see what happens with it.
