Stuff looks interesting. I think I'd like to run my own website/online business, seems cool to be fully responsible for your profitability (well almost) as opposed to poker. Thing is I have no idea what I would sell/talk about . Anyone been in this situation and got something running?

bumpracerx dot com

This is my little forum on the web. It's slowly growing, key word is s l o w l y. The problem is, I have not clue how to make money with it.

I personally enjoy finding cool links and adding them to the page, but some of that might become an option once the site starts rolling.

So far the site has almost 400 unique visitors in its first ten days of operation. I'm thinking of ways to improve traffic without spending for it. One idea we've been doing is to shout out our link on youtube whenever we use a specific link. Another avenue we've been using is basically asking our friends to check it out and finally we just started grinding out twitter.

The website is still in its infancy, any suggestions on increasing traffic would be welcome.

Do blogroll exchanges with other similar sites. Put a "Bookmark Us" or "Stumble Us" button on the top.

Basically to improve your traffic without spending you're going to have to sacrifice your own time and do a lot of research to even know what is effective. And considering how cheap you can get work done, you'd have to not value your time at all to not outsource it. You can get a lot of work done for what comes out to less than $3/hr if you had to do it yourself.

If I were you I'd start off with a Red Virus package for $19 - http://www.wickedfire.com/links-seo/...ial-sites.html


I would also consider making your header way smaller. It does nothing. When I come to your site I want to see links not a giant header. And do something about the dates of the links. Add an H1 tag that reads, "The web's top 30 links for MM-YY-DDDD" on the homepage. I don't know if the links I'm looking at are fresh or haven't been updated in 2 weeks. Then add an archive page for each expired date. A CMS like Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla could handle all of that for you with a little bit of configuration.

Thanks guys, I appreciate it. I will think about this some more as I create content for it.

Along with two other people, I am involved with a forum in a similar niche that gets quite a decent amount of traffic (for the niche). We tried striking deals with local dealers, but they are too cheap and we found adsense to be better as a primary source. You can look for good and useful affiliate offers and put them up as you find them.

IMO, the best thing to do is to just grow the forum. Presumably, people don't want to join forums that are full of ads everywhere. Ads detract from forum experience. If you are trying to make something out of this, you need to focus on becoming the top 3 forum for this subject first. Run some contest and promos that benefit your with traffic and membership. With forums, I think it's a mistake to try to monetize small traffic - it usually hurts you from getting bigger and since you have little traffic to begin with you won't make much at all anyway. Every forum I have ever seen become successful - none of them had any ads at the beginning. As they became the place to be, they very slowly introduced more and more ads.

slapping display ads on a low traffic forum is going to yield very poor results. To make money with display ads on a forum you are going to need a LOT of traffic.

To make money with a slower traffic forum you are going to have to find a product that interests your user base and promote it. I have a friend who runs a hunting forum and he is the go-to guy for advice about Garmin GPS dog trackers. He sells quite a few of them through his site and gets about 10% in commission I think.

Thanks for posting that link. It looks like a great place to get effective marketing services cheap. Another great thread on that site is What's the best service on WF?: "Out of all the services in the Buy, Sell & Trade section....post which/who's service for you, has been the best bang for the buck."

What is the equivalent best value place to find site design services in your opinions?

The only place I've used for design is 99designs. It's nice in that you get to see a good variety of design concepts before choosing one.

Coming up with a good idea is hard. You have to have business in the back of your mind, and something will come up. Maybe while watching tv, having a conversation, or just day dreaming.

I don't have a great idea. However, when I do, I want to have the expertise and resources to take it to its full potential. Right now I'm just working on sub-par idea. I don't plan on it blowing up to a $100,000/year profit website ever. But I'm learning a lot every day by doing and reading, than just by reading.

PM me with ur aim or msn if you want to talk some.

I would say the idea is the easy part. Just take what someone is already doing that looks like a good idea and do it better. Why do you think Facebook beat myspace? google beat altavista?

Another thing you could do is take already proven idea and customize it for a specific targetted niche. One of the awesome things about the internet is that you can make money in really specific niches.

I kind of agree about coming up with ideas being the easy part. And maxtower is right on target about the internet being great for making money in highly specific niches. Here's one approach:

1. Think of something where people tend to spend a lot of money and tend to be repeat customers. Some examples: gambling, health clubs, insurance, specialized herbal remedies, etc.

2. Find an affiliate program for the product that gives you an ongoing share of revenue. If no such program exists, try to contact a supplier of the product and arrange some sort of deal where they'll pay you for referrals.

3. Create content that would be of interest to potential customers of that product.

4. Build up traffic.

In an way this is backwards of what some of you are doing...creating content, building up traffic, and THEN trying to figure out how to monetize it.

anyone got any comments on the amazon affiliate program? i'm building a website and i wanted to recommend some books for my niche, but it barely seems worth the time to sign up and get ref codes for the 4% commission. i mean it's still worth it but it seems like such ****ing robbery to not even get 50 cents for getting a sale amazon guaranteed wouldn't get otherwise. are the profit margins really thin or are they just getting away with it because they can?

Profit margins are really that thin. But you also get some money if the person purchases something else after you send them to Amazon.

Amazon makes 3.5% after tax profit on sales (their one big shiny star being high margin kindle). And I think it's lower on books. Newegg and some of the other heavy hitters are similar.

Yeah, Amazon doesn't make enough to be able to pay out much. It's usually not worth running their affiliate program. You should focus on products that pay much more commission.

My experience was that Amazon was fairly worthless, even in a very targeted niche. People don't spend enough with them, the commissions aren't high enough, and I don't think you own the customer referral forever...only for a limited period of time.

Luego, look into Audible (audio books) and their affiliate program. http://www.audible.com/affiliate-intro

that would be sweet but my niche doesn't do audiobooks.

i used to do some HTML and stuff 8 years ago so i thought this stuff would come easy to me. but it's proving to be pretty confusing. i'm having tons of trouble even getting the facebook like-button on my wordpress-blog. it seems i need some kind of plugin, and for that i need to install some kind of local server with PHP and stuff?

i figure my wordpress blog would be about 1000 times more useful with social bookmarking. what should i do?

You can actually install plugins directly from the Wordpress admin if you are running Wordpress installed on a hosted server. If you are running your blog on Wordpress.com I don't think you can install plugins.

Under plugins - add new - search for the plugin you want to install - install - activate

There are probably over 200+ Facebook like plugins for wordpress (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins)

Here are a couple that seems to be popular:

ShareThis

Social Slider

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

If you guys would like, I can setup a server and be your admin (setup word press, email, domains, answer questions about code/webapps). If there is any interest shoot me a PM and what you are currently paying monthly, and what your requirments are. If there are 10 -15 guys who need hosting and consulting services, and we can work out a decent price, Ill setup a ticket system, and put up a server to try to save you guys some money and time. Plus maybe we can get a nice little chat room/private forum, and feed off each others experience and ideas in real time.



(fwiw, I currently work in a datacenter and deal with this **** daily)

man if i had known that you couldn't install plugins in the web interface i would have gone with another option...

It's tiered: sell just 7 items and you're up to 6%. Don't expect to make a lot unless you're a books site, but here's a hint: send AdWords traffic on "yourniche books" terms to your books page. Even if you just break even it'll bring in more traffic to your site.

Amazon is cool because everyone trusts it and you have a cookie window. I've sold a Kindle because someone went to Amazon from a link on one of my sites that was for a much cheaper item. I've heard of people buying $1,000+ TVs from people's links who weren't selling them.

Would anyone be willing to help me out with this WP-dilemma I'm having? I have some quality content and an okay number of unique daily views already and would like to keep hosting it on WordPress, but I really REALLY want a Facebook Like-button on each article. I plan to read up on all of these technical aspects of it very soon, but I'm pretty swamped at the moment and would just like to get my blog fully functional quickly.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fblikebutton/

unzip this to your wp-content/plugins directory, then admin login -> plugins -> activate it