Starting a Forum - How to Make it Succesful?

[Alacrity Digital]

I ran a very successful forum in a very targeted niche. I made loads of fake profiles originally to create and reply to threads, as nobody will ever sign up to a dead forum.

What I can tell you though, is that forums don't really make that much money in comparison to a 'normal' website. It took 2 years for me to become the 'top' forum in my niche, and it made me barely any money whatsoever. (I was even getting linked to by HUGE multi-million authority sites!) If I ranked top for keywords for an amazon site or something instead, it would have gained me amazing profits.

Best of luck though, running a forum is fun, regardless of the problems I faced. If I had to do it again, I'd focus on creating a membership service to monetize the forum, rather than using adsense/amazon ads.

 

[pirxus]

Thanks, @FeroXs. That's good to know.

What I'd like to make with the forum is at least 5K USD/month. I already have a successful business running for years, but it's based on selling software solutions for bloggers. I have almost zero experience with AdSense. What kind of traffic would I need to make at least $5K/month from ads only?

I was also thinking about including a "Resources" section where I'd have affiliate links to hosting and other service providers. I can't really use Amazon in my niche.

EDIT:
Oh, btw, I do remember that another guy on the forum had a forum on his own, but it was based around a certain game, I think. It was fairly popular, but I think he made 200 USD/month (from AdSense only) or something like that.

 

[gtull2]

That's inspiring! I too thought about hiring people on MicroWorkers, but since it's a tech/niche forum, I'm not sure if that would work. Maybe I could ask in the job description for devs only. Maybe it could work.

Why did G penalize your site? Did you use any black hat type of back-links?

Yeah, of course I did. But I never really found out what I did wrong. One day it was getting crazy traffic, the next day very little.

Keeping up with the spam bots on a forum sucks so bad. I left it alone for over a year and just let it go. It kept making decent money for a long time until it finally got deindexed.

 

[RayChand]

If you want to build a solid foundation for your forum, make sure it has content before you start advertising it. If your forum has no content and you advertise it, people won't look back once they see there are a total of 10 threads in your forum. You can employ forum posting services to create the illusion that your forum is active at the very beginning. After that, it's great to manually interact with other forums and advertise where available. Once you get some growth, it should get progressively easier.

 

[Faldor]

It's better to have a few busy sections than lots of quiet ones.