Making Money through Online Forums
Have you ever joined an online forum? Maybe you know them as online communities, basically they are a place where you discuss the realms of different topics, and you’ve probably thought about the money that forum owners make off the users, or maybe you haven’t. This may come as a surprise to you, but forum users can actually make money online, from the forum as well, so now it’s not just the owner who is profiting from it.
Let’s break this down into you, a specific person. Let’s say you love a certain game like “Runescape“, and you post on a runescape forum, and say make 100 posts per day (a little high but…) and have say 10k posts on the forum. (This is a very high example, and it’s not needed to do this), and you figure that you’ve just done the posts for fun. But guess what, you’ve made a profitable business, just by “posting for fun”.
So… How do we turn this forum account into a “Business”, first we need to find out what parts of the account, are worth anything to people. We don’t want to sell the account, we want to keep using it, but profiting out of it. The first thing you’ll notice is the “signature” spot. Dependent on the forum, they will allow you to have a signature, and using your signature, you can post links to people’s websites. We’ve now found profit point #1, forum signature links, you can advertise this then, as a link building opportunity, because of the amount of posts you have, being a link each (links in mass).
Next, we probably have an avatar on the forum, dependent on the forum (you should check the rules), you may be allowed to use your avatar for advertising a business. I know many people that buy avatars to help get traffic to their websites, another profit point which you can “cash in on”. You can also consider selling the “blog feed” spot, which is not available on many forums anyways. Or you can sell the location slot, which some people would love to put their address in, hoping to gain some traffic.
So now that you’ve figured out, what you can sell of your forum profiles, you should think about the different ways you can market this, first of all you need to figure out, who are the people, of the market you need to sell to. They are probably “website owners” who want back-links and more traffic to their websites, so we need to seek out these people, find them, and turn them into our clients.
So when you break down, a webmaster, you want to find out where they hang out, and where they look for sales, and deals for their site. The first thing, is forums, forums in the website owner niche, this are commonly referred to as “Webmaster Forums”, and there are many popular forums, most of the top forums in this niche will have people looking to buy your signature links, so it will be an easy sell. The same thing will work for the rest of the profile things we discuss, a tip is to try and sell them all in the same thread, so someone who wants to in regular words “own your profile” can.
Most forum owners, are very happy about people profiting from their forums, in fact if you do this using my forums, (I have this Graphics Forum, and this Chat). However, some forum owners, may restrict what part of your profiles you may sell, in these cases it’s always best to check a forums rules, which look something like this. If they don’t let you sell parts of your profile, you should probably join another forum.
I haven’t mentioned this yet, so I should throw this out there now, if you can’t find anyone in your niche that will buy your signatures, etc, you could try marketing products (related) through your forum profiles, through affiliate marketing, and maybe make some cash with sales, a great alternative.
I’ve tried to go in-depth with this post for you, so I hope you enjoyed it, I’ve been very stressed out about some things going on lately, so this is the best article I could write 
Hope you enjoyed…
Your Friend,
Caleb Bozonessinc Spilchen
P.S. Have a great day
