Senin, 09 Juni 2008

Are Website Forums Profitable? by Guido Nussbaum

There are so many different ways that you can pull traffic into your website. Some people spend a lot of their time doing search engine optimization, trying to rank well in the search engines for specific keyword phrases. Other individuals use such things as Web 2.0 marketing or article marketing in order to achieve a steady stream of visitors. If you really want to crank up your visitor numbers, however, you can add a Forum to your website. These particular scripts are a fantastic way to get people talking about whatever your website is about. It will pull in targeted traffic from search engines and from anywhere else that feeds these various forums.

Setting up a forum is relatively easy if you are at least a little bit handy in managing your server. In fact, if you have Cpanel, you can set up a free Forum automatically. That is fine as long as you don't mind keeping it clean from all of the spam that will end up on it. It is a much better idea if you spend a little bit of money and buy one of the higher end Forum scripts and install it on your website. There are several of these scripts that are available, some of which are more popular than others. Look for one that has all of the features that you need and offers good support.

Once you have the forum setup on your webpage, it's time to get people talking. This can be a little bit difficult as nobody really wants to be the first person to actually begin talking in one of these areas. You can get the ball rolling, however, in a number of different ways. One way that you can do so is by making up a few fictitious names and to begin holding conversations with yourself using these names. Try to make it fun and people will jump in on the conversation. Before long, your forum will have a life of its own. There are also some services which will take care of this for you. Try to make sure that you use a service that will post actual content, not just fly by postings.

One of the most difficult parts about owning a forum, however, is that they tend to be very unprofitable. In fact, many individuals that run a forum only do so because they really love what they are doing, not in order to make a profit. That doesn't mean, however, that you can't really pull some money out of your forum if you use a little bit of effort. You need to go beyond simply adding some Adsense ads into the forum software if you really want to make a profit. Use every means that you possibly can to direct these people to affiliate programs and other offers that are directly related to what you are talking about. If you're able to do this effectively, the profits will follow naturally.

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