Thanks guys, I appreciate it. I will think about this some more as I create content for it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by __w__
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.
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.