How can my Forum Help me Earn?

[SimplySidy]

Hi

To start off, I am ill, and have been at home since 2008 with not much of income and earnings. I work as a Freelance website developer though the work is not regular. Earlier, when I was healthy, I had a forum wherein I asked my students to participate and discuss their doubts and even I kept posting content. Unfortunately when I fell ill in 2008, and was on the bed for 8 long months, I lost that Forum.

Today, I am trying to figure out that if I recreate the forum or even a new one, how can I earn from it - may not be that big, but at least some money to keep the medicine bills getting paid or even the other petty expenses that everyone has...

Any tips would be welcome and much appreciated.

[diplox]

Well I think there's a number of ways you could monetize a forum, although I think it's better to create the forum first, and then worry about a monetization structure later. I think the most obvious way would be to use ads, from a provider like AdSense, but then it would depend largely upon your content as AdSense uses content to decide which ads to run, and different ads have different payouts.

Another solution I've seen recently, is to modify the forum core either directly or with a plugin, to automatically wrap all outgoing links with something like adfly which is an interstitial ad system that pays by impressions.

You could also look at promoting and selling some digital products, really the skies the limit in terms of ways you can monetize.

[Don Quixote]

Do you still own the domain name of that forum? If you do, then you can restart that forum. Aged domain names do some some kind of value. I think the easiest and most direct way of monetizing a forum is by subscriptions. There are some big forums which are entirely funded by subscriptions. If you keep the subscriptions low and make your forum interesting, there are many members who would subscribe just to help with the costs of running the forum.

If you need any help, just ask.

[bauss]

You can earn from adsense, but it'll take time to get any decent income off a forum. It's extremely hard to get a new forum off the ground, and it required a lot of dedication.

If you're doing it for the money it's probably better to start another website.

[slap2dgroove]

Everyone already said the good points in monetizing your forum!

Now if you have already rebuilt your forum, increase traffic. You wouldnt earn if no one is visiting your forum. Good relevant content from members are one of the keys to have more visits.
Now if you have decent visits, you need to moderate your forum a lot in order not to degrade your forum. For sure therell be a lot of spammers, members who are bashers etc. You need to have a strict control of your site to keep it going for a long time.

And lastly lets monetize it... As everyone had already suggested, Adsense is the best or you can host your own ads and ask for a monthly price from the advertiser.