My Forum Empire

[Jon123456]

I have visions (illusions? lol) of creating a discussion forum empire, all giving me relatively hands-off passive income for years to come. I've already got a busy discussion forum going, but seek to do a new one in a broader category.

Here is my latest project: Go Discuss

Any comments or improvements you would like to suggest?

Thanks,

Jon

 

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[smartfastlane]

Get your first forum started before thinking of an empire. You need some active members posting daily. I think the topic is to broad, when you focus on a niche you can get more interested members to sign up and post.

How do you plan to monetize?

 

[Jon123456]

I already have a forum with over 20K unique visitors per day. This is my new project. The other one was in a niche but I want to have a general discussion forum since the scalability is considerable.

To monetize, I will take my banner advertising experience gained from owning my previous forum and apply it to this one.

 

[garyfritz]

Good lord. What forum have you built with 20k unique visitors per day? And how did you build it, how long did it take to build?

What sort of income do banners provide in a 20k/day forum?

 

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[Jon123456]

Its a technology forum that I started about 10 years ago. I do not wish to divulge my income on it but let us say that optimising the position of banners, where the banners are from and the number of banners makes a huge difference.

One year ago I was earning £Xpm. After tweaking and optimising the above mentioned areas, I got it to 10 x £X - a huge difference! It pays to constantly test and tweak your adverts.

 

[garyfritz]

Nice! And yes, sorry, I didn't mean to pry into your income. Just curious what sort of results that size of forum can create. Very interesting that you were able to increase the results 10x!

 

[JEdwards]

1. Are you going to create this empire by spamming other forums for users. (not that there is anything wrong with that)

2. Since you have 20k daily users on your other site, why in the world dont you start this new forum on your other forum and create new members from there, I.E. why are you starting from scratch? Do your members now have nothing to go discuss?

3. You have 1800 members, you have denied 13k spammers.. but yet you only have 60 posts? I guess those 1800 members signed up and did nothing.

 

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[Jon123456]

1. I am in the process of formulating my marketing, so not sure what I will employ yet. Might test using Twitter, some backlinking, paid forum posters etc.

2. Don't really understand what you mean.

3. Those 1800 members will all be bots that signed up.

Some forums can earn considerable money, but it depends on the niche, optimisation and traffic volume. Health and finance do well, but they are also very competitive. Mine gives me a slightly better than average wage, although I do next to nothing for it now. e.g. I might spend an hour a month on it sometimes, or other times if I am trying to improve the site I might do a couple of days on it.

 

[Scuderia]

wow 20k visitors a day is impressive. What do you think are the main critical factors for a forum like that to become soo successful?

 

[kurtyordy]

IMHO opinion, you need to niche it down and focus. If I want to hear stupid opinions about every stupid topic under the sun, I log into facebook or twitter. If I actually want to learn something or engage in something, I look for something more niche specific.

 

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[Jon123456]

The critical factors are time and being an early adopter. I created a forum when few existed.

I understand your reasoning about doing a niche forum. I have one and will be doing other niche forums too. But since there are so many niche forums, a general forum almost becomes a niche! In fact, many forums start off as a niche and grow to include non-niche items. Check out the sports, politics etc. sections of many niche forums.

Why not try it the other way around?

 

[MJ DeMarco]

I've already got a busy discussion forum going

Please do provide the URL.

 

[Jon123456]

My forum is here: Access World Forums

I hope you can see the content for the ads. lol

Edit: Oh, check out my banner ad I just placed today for my godiscuss.co.uk site. Its at the bottom of the page.

 

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[kurtyordy]

Why not try it the other way around?

because I care about what you said about horses (for example only) I will also have some interest in your view on xyz movie. So my desire to learn more about horses will drive me to find your site, and the quality of the site will keep me there to find more about the extra stuff.

However, if your site is about anything and everything, I just tend not to care. Not trying to be debbie downer here, just giving my $0.02. Unless I am looking for xyz and you have seo'd the site that it comes up in my search results, I probably will never land on your site.

 

[Jon123456]

Its a perfectly understandable take, doing a forum in a niche. Its what I did. But I fancy trying general. I saw a site in the USA with a huge number of posts on it. It was a general forum. It made me think SCALE.

 

[OrangeFirefly]

Unbelievable mate, I thought nobody does / likes MS Access. I guess I'm like that, if I'm not into something, I think no one is, and if I see great value somewhere, I tend to think everyone will. Well, that is not always the case lol. Congrats for putting it up.

Regarding the forum about anything, my initial impulse was the same as kurty's, why would anyone join a forum where people just ramble all day, and who would have time to do all the rambling? But then I remembered a very successful forum, which is just about that. Anything. People talk about cars, business paperwork, taxes, lawyers, babies, food, doctors, where to spend your holiday, music, politics, religion, you name it, there's a topic on that forum about it. Pretty much anytime someone who knows about that forum has a question, they go ask there, people will be helpful.

It's not in English, but if you'll have a look you'll know what I mean. Just now it has

Total mesaje: 10 085 662
Total membri inregistraţi: 531 576
3735 membri activi în ultimele 15 minute (are you f kidding me??)

It's Forumul Softpedia

It's like, that place has a vibe of its own. Great place.

I wish you the best of luck and even more members than that one! Keep us posted.

 

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[Jon123456]

What you can get with a general forum is volume of people. Where there are a lot of people, they may dip into many of the different forums. This brings value because you can get answers to your questions quite quickly. It might not work and doing a niche may be easier, but how do you know unless you try?

Another benefit of a general forum is that you can always have it open. Rather than having lots of memberships to niche forums, you can just keep the one open and post to the various sections.