For starters, for those of you who didn’t know, I have a couple of fairly successful forums. From time to time I get emails from people who just started a new forum and want to know how to make money from it. My answer is pretty much always the same so I might as well just write it once here and be done with it so I can just point them to this blog post whenever they ask me again. 
First things first. Ask yourself the following question: Am I starting this forum to earn a living? If the answer is yes, stop reading this post right now and don’t quit your day job. An EXTREMELY small percentage of all successful forums are making enough money to survive on. You need to have been doing it a long time and really have a business model together, as well as a busy niche with advertisers already lined up in order to even start thinking about this. On top of that, you’re going to need a busy forum and lots of traffic and lots of posts from lots of intelligent people (and preferrably from a demographic that likes to buy things online, hence the avenue for advertisers to pay you to be on your site hoping your surfers will buy their products).
If you really stop for a minute and think this through, you’ll realize that it’s a LOT harder than you originally thought to run a forum that brings you in the big bucks. Now, if you’re just looking to do it for fun and if you happen to make money off of it that’s great, that’s a different story. Now you can go follow the direction of all of the other people online who tell you to sign up for Google AdSense or YPN or AdBrite or any of those other companies. They do work, they do pay, and you can make a decent amount of money from a busy forum. I won’t go into lots of detail about these programs or what program is best for what kind of site because it’s been gone over about a million times on other sites.
So, to sum up this short blog post I’ll just say the following. To monetize your forum, you’ll really need the following:
- Traffic
- Traffic
- Traffic
- New posts
- Advertisers
Note lots of traffic comes first. Get the traffic and the rest will follow.