Earning Money

I got a question once from a friend and he was asking me whether he should keep his blog about making money online or if he should turn it into a forum, specifically a webmaster forum. Now, we all know that I am a blogger and I am more passionate about blogging than being a forum webmaster, but, I wondered if creating a webmaster forum was really the best thing that he could do. I wanted to talk about creating a webmaster forum and what comes with creating one now, but before I do, here is one that you can use as a reference and what I think is a good one. My friend’s webmaster forum.

One of the things that I look for when I am looking to join a webmaster forum is if it has an active buy and sell forum. That is the one thing my friend’s site is lacking, but I don’t mind. I think that a webmaster forum really needs to have a good buy and sell forum because it ensures that there are people on the site. However, on top of that, it needs to have the right topics. I think a topic on the top three search engines is important and I think that topics on link building, marketing, and all of that is necessary. But, above all, what is necessary is some form of individuality. You need to stand out amongst the crowd and that is the hardest part about creating a webmaster forum.

There are a ton of webmaster forums out there that are really big. They have active buy/sell forums. They have active all forums. And the problem with creating a new one is that you are dependent on other people coming to post on your site. Why would they if they are already posting on one that can offer them more? That is where the tricky part comes in. You can do what my friend did and offer a contest, but that only works long enough for the contest to run out and then, unless the site is really active, it will die down as well. So, you have to figure out a way to really make your site unique so that people are interested in coming back to it time and time again.

Do I think that my friend should have converted his blog into a forum? No. The reason behind this is starting a forum requires about five times the amount of work as it requires to run a blog. On a blog, you are posting alone and it is very easy to get someone to read your content. Getting someone to POST is the hard part and the part that most people don’t realize. People don’t mind reading, but people will mind posting unless there is a real reason to post and that is why I always love blogging over forums. However, there are benefits to running a forum that I have said before in the past.

Overall, unless you have something amazing to offer to people, creating a webmaster forum is damn hard unless you have some amazing passion. I have seen forums die really fast and I have seen them take forever to grow. Can it happen? Yes. However, you really need a lot of dedication. Starting a make money online blog? That’s tough. But, anyone can do it if you have any idea about the niche. Starting a webmaster forum? That requires a lot of knowledge about being a webmaster and something unique. Or, you just need a lot of friends to constantly post threads and make the site big that way. Best of luck regardless.

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When I look at some of these large forums, I ask myself how they were able to get so big. Did they really offer the uniqueness people wanted? Or were they just early in the market so they had the time to grow? Was there something else that was really helping them that was revolutionary in the market? I was looking at a forum I used to frequent and I was trying to figure out if they would have been such a success if the owner did not set up an adsense sharing system on the forum. Would he have been quite so successful and is it really a good idea to use that on your forum? I’m going to talk about the latter, but the former will always be on my mind.

What happens when you use an adsense sharing system on your forum is that you are, in a sense, setting up a way to share the clicks that you get with those that post on your forum. To get them to post more threads, you say that whenever they post a thread, 50% (or whatever %) of the impressions that appear. So, say you make a thread and ten people see it, half of the time, your adsense code would be up and if someone clicked on that ad while your code was up, bam, you’d make money for that click. So, in a sense, this was a way to get people to post more and more threads because they hoped that if they made so many, they might really begin to get some clicks on their ads and thus, make some decent money. Is that the case? Depends on the forum.

So, that brings up another question. How do I know if MY forum is the right forum to use this adsense sharing program on? You don’t really know. Naturally, if you run a webmaster forum, you’re going to offer it because most webmasters use Adsense to make money. But, what if you don’t run a webmaster forum like MOST of us don’t? Is it a good idea? That all depends on how crafty you are. Let’s just say that you want to try and make money on every single one of your users, but you don’t want to take their money? Set up a page ALL about the revenue sharing. Let them know that every time they make a thread, X% of the time, their ads will appear. But, if your niche is ‘dog care,’ chances are, they won’t have an adsense account. That’s fine. At the end of the page, put in a nice large banner that says, “if you haven’t signed up for adsense, sign up here!” Then, you’ll get the money for signing them up and, they will start to populate your forum more. And, if they see that there is money to make online, they may just try harder to make more threads and you get the point.

Revenue sharing works if you can manipulate it to work. Set up the % to 85% like my friend at webmaster forum does. By doing that, he has shown people that he really wants them to make money and that really helps. Fifteen percent may not seem like a lot of money, but if you’ve got a lot of people making threads, then it really does add up. A forum can’t succeed without threads and posts and all of that; the more that you are getting posted, the better. And, your members will be happy, so they will bring even MORE people to try and help their friends make money too. Sure, you won’t make 100% of the income on the site, but you will get a large forum and that is where the success is on the forum. Good luck.

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