[collinsca]

I have decided to create a forum- there does not appear to be another one out there on this subject.

How can I go about earning money from this site? Would I have to get a good client base first and then get money for ads?

Or should I plan ahead?

Advice appreciated

[DJDK]

You can have 2 types of membership, Free with adverts, or subscription which could include no adverts and access to extra parts of the forum. but it all depends on how you want to implement your site.

[collinsca]

hmmm thanks
well i could not charge the intial people could i...
people wont join if there is nothing on there- or not many people on there!?

[DJDK]

thats the problem that you will get is where to draw the line on how many will get free membership and so on, thats why a free option and a subscription option would be ideal, and you could possible give away some subscriptions in a competition, but then again its up to you,

[D-A-L]

For a new site like that your best bet in my opinion is Google Adsense. Adsense allows you to montetise your content by placing up to three different ad blocks on each page serving contextual text or image ads.

Forums are not great at pulling much revenue from adverts though just because of the nature of people visiting. You will find you will usually have one of two types of visitors (depending on the forum content) One is the regular member who becomes banner blind and visits a few times a week, they are unlikely to click ads. Secondly you have the Googler, who randomly finds you from a search, grabs the info they came for and disappears again.

If, and when you do get high volumes of traffic however you can monetise the content in other ways such as Banners which are paid on an impression basis rather than a cost per click basis and also content links. All of these examples can be found on D-A-L.

It is also a good idea to limit the advertising you show to logged in members. For example if you log out of D-A-L, go to a thread and you will see more ads than if your logged in.

[collinsca]

hmmm interesting- thanks for that DAL.

what would you say is a high level of traffic- to be able to start earning....?

[D-A-L]

Well you can earn with very little traffic, but likewise your earnings will also be low. It really depends on the topic of the forum as Adsense pays different amounts depending on the topic and who's advert it is etc

The best thing to do is try it out but I would build at least some foundation first in terms of visitors before you do this. Look for at least a few hundred unique visitors on a daily basis.