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You already know that you can make money using other people’s forums, but what prevents you from starting your own forum?

Creating a forum is great because once it starts, it will keep growing by itself. Popular forums have thousands of new posts everyday, and new members registering all the time. If you can ever get to that level, your new forum can be one of the best source for passive income. Besides some moderation, of which many people will even volunteer doing it for free for you because of the power it gives them, there is hardly anything you need to do with a growing forum.

To make a forum, you first need your software. You have the choice of using phpBB or Vbulletin. Vbulltin is not free and phpBB is. They both have some unique features, but if you just starting out, phpBB is good enough. It may also help you decide knowing that GaiaOnline, the largest forum on the internet, uses phpBB. You can download and read all the tutorials on their site.

After you have set everything up, it’s time to fill up the forums. Which also means starting to get traffic. If you have a website or blog, you have to write all the content and information, and then get traffic. When you set up a forum, your traffic and the content of your forum are one; if you have content, this means you have traffic since it is your users who wrote everything. But getting to the point where everything works for you takes an incredible amount of work, and if you don’t want to speed things up, you will have to spend some money.

You will need money both for promotion and for paid post. If you are going to use promotion, it is best to have a website as well, and have the forum incorporated to it. Spending $1000 to have users visit your forum, only to find out it’s empty and leave, is not money well spent.

If you don’t want to have a site and want a forum only, you have 2 choices. Either you will have to make all the posts to kick start your forum by yourself, or need to pay someone to do it for you. The best way to do this is do both at the same time. To advertise in order to get people posting on your forum, you can post on Digital Point Forums. It is a great forum for anything that have to do with websites, selling websites, internet marketing, etc…

The fee you pay them is totally up to you, but to give you an idea I know many people who pay 0.10$ per post to fill their forums. With their post you can also make your posts at the same times to make everything go faster. Try to encourage replies and discussions when you post.

There is no magic formula to start a passive income forum, hard work and time are the only ingredients. Depending of how effort and/or money and time you are willing to spend, it may take at least 6-12 months before any kind of advertising you put on your forum starts generating profit.

Have you decided that you want to sell your home? No matter what you think, you can always increase the value of your home by a smaller amount that you want to sell it later on. You can always pour in $500 in small renovations that will increase it by at least the same amount, and most of the times more. Another way is to put the renovations in terms of work and not so much of money, and this is when the value of your home really starts gaining value without much investment.

If you want to sell your home at a higher price, put yourself in the shoes of the buyer. Every time you do something or change something to increase the value of your home, think if the buyer (you) would be more impressed and psychologically value the home at a higher price.

What is the first thing a buyer looks at when entering a home? Before even entering the home he sees the outside of the home. This is often overlooked. You should take into account every little aspect of the outside. Think of the grass, is the color and the cut even? Are the windows clean and shining? Is the painting of the house fresh and glossy, or is it dry and has a rusty look? Painting the house will cost some money, but in this case it is well worth it because the actually dirty paint devalues your home. You also must think about the outside decoration. You can buy small little decorative elements in store that makes your home very elegant and original. Think of the stairs and the doors. Think of the fence. Think of the flowers. Think of the light bulbs. Every detail counts, but all details add up.

After you have thought of the exterior, now is the time of the interior. Again, same exercise as before, every detail counts. For the interior however, 2 things are a must. First, fresh paint. Even if you think the paint you have right now is good enough, you are probably just used to it and don’t see anything wrong with it, but just apply a new coat of paint. Second, ceramic tiles. This one will be the investment part where you have to put in money. The money invested in ceramic tiles gives one of the highest returns. The best part in installing ceramic tiles is that most people do not know that they can do it themselves! There are many books and tutorials out there that explain you how to do it, and there is no staff to pay, just the tiles and the small products you need to install. Besides the tiles and the paint, you should start going in every room to make sure everything is perfect. Nothing should be out of the place, all the doors must be noiseless, everything should be shining. There are nice products that sell in hardware stores that really give a shine to materials, use these products before visits. No cracks in walls, no rusted metals, nice faucets, original light fixtures, etc, etc…

Whatever you do, be the buyer and think what you would want to see in a new home. Try not to overspend and respect your budget. Think in terms of little things that make big differences.