Why forum business is so difficult?

checked your forum, it looks nice. how old is it? what kind of revenue are u generating from it?

 

You're right I should. Google has a huge tendency to smartprice me at every other opportunity though thanks to my teenage demographic.

 

You may want to try to generate revenue with those hosted pic revenue share programs. Imagecash or something like that. Also seeding your forums with threads that have upsell links.

Maybe PPC ads are too passive, try something more aggressive that still fits the community profile and content of your site?

 

I can only agree,

we are running a Forum since 5 Years, 7000+ Members and round a bout 40.000 Unique Hits a Month (400.000 PI) .. but no big Money

 

How much clicks to PPC ads?

 

These days, you pretty much don't make money with forums, you need to moderate them, animate them, and remove all spam messages 2x a day, messages that are sent by spam bots. That's why there must be a very good reason for some one to start a forum.

 

I have a spanish community based on vbulletin, almost 6 years online and more than 120.000 users, 50.000 unique visits per day, etc... and making an average of USD180 per day with adsense.

site: psicofxp.com

 

It's getting harder and harder. There are hundreds of new forums emerging each day. Some admins don't have the time/knowledge/patience to make them grown and are usually closing in few months because they thought that setting the forums will instantly bring in thousands of members. Well. it's not that easy

 

I managed to get a few posters. It took a lot of work. I cant figure how to make it grow even more

 

ever though of using a different(new) adsense account in ur forum, say ur gal friend's or ur family member's. Many members have post the cases when they got some nice increase on using friend's account on their site.

 

Yeah, forums are really bad in revenue.

I'm running a few of them with cTR < 1% really bad. I've started my first forum on Feb 2006 & no a lots of members & visitors. But no clicks

Any tips for bettter CTR in vB or IPB forums.

 

There's many ways to measure success. Maybe if you get a lot of eyeballs to your forum, you can try Branding as a revenue source.

 

maybe something like this could get things moving for you
http://www.acneforums.net/viewtopic.php?t=160

 

Thinking outside the box, I like it. My forum's been up since beginning of April, so far acrued almost 90 members. The trouble is almost every single member has registered purely for the competitions I've been running - similar to yours girl, to enter you have to register your interest in the competion thread. I then promote the competition on some prize finder sites and other forums and thats where my traffic is coming from. It spikes when I launch a new competion(even then its not exactly pulling up trees) then dwindles till the competion's close date (and once it is closed these members dont bother posting in threads). Ive certainly spent more than I've earned in adsense revenue to date. Im still optimistic, but it does become wearisome at times.

 

How about promoting programs that pay you for giving away stuff?

 

I have had many different forums, but they are always hit or miss. And they seem to go in spurts like everything else. But as far as making money, they are REALLY slow.

-Ryan

 

can we have a url to your forum? I might join....not to win your comps obviously

 

Sure you can:

http://www.dvdbargainalerts.co.uk/phpBB2

Sorry can't post live links yet, but you can get to it through my recent blog link tho. Its an affiliate bargain forum based around DVDs/CDs & Video Games, but there are many categories for subjects other than bargain hunting.

 

hi, i think you should try and open more and more useful threads, make your URLs Search Engine Friendly, so that you start getting traffic directly from the search engine. If people find interesting topics, they will join your forum.

 

Thats interesting rosiee, but how exactly can you make a forum URL search engine friendly?