Make Money With a Forum Part 1
Forums are a great way to make money. 2 ways you can make money with a forum, you either use other peoples’ forums, or you create your own forum, or both.
If you are going to use other people’s forum, you will be better off using the big forums already established. Using big and very popular forums will make sure your time will be the best spent and you will get maximum exposure.
You might be asking yourself how you will find all these forums and how you will find out if they are popular. Here is an excellent resource that will save your hours and days of research. That site will not only rank all the forum by popularity, but you will also find out how many posts and members they have, along with a description of each forum. The best way to use these forums is through you forum signature, or as people call it, your sig. This is a great way for either traffic or for making money with affiliates. As you will also find here, making use of these forums intelligently by building your reputation with quality posts is the best way of success. Do not spam any of these forums, as the last thing you want is to get banned from these big boards. When browsing through the list of forums, pay attention if they allow use of HTML code. It is this HTML code in your forum signature that will make you money. Many forums have disabled HTML so people do not spam, but the vast majority of forums still have HTML enabled. You will also find many forums where you have to pay in order to be a member, or you have to pay to be allowed to access certain sections. You will have to use your judgment here to determine if it is worth paying for these. Keep in mind that if you join a group where people have paid to be a member, these are more serious readers and maybe worth your money. Try also to see if the owner of the forum is not profiting from its popularity to just make every member pay to join; if the previous members did not pay, this may make everything less valuable.
Just how much money can you make with forums or message boards? Earnersblog says he made $800 in one day. That was with Yahoo Answers Message Board. I believe yahoo does not allow promoting in their forums, but you can use the same method in other message boards. The experiment shows the potential.
You can read Part 2 on how to make money with your own message boards.