I know that mini sites are all the rage right now but I was thinking about other ways to monetize a domain when it hit me….. a niche form! Almost everyone has visited or belongs to some type of forum. I researched other forums within my niche and almost without exception they had a large volume of daily visitors and thousands of members. The niche has nothing to do with domaining, but a past time that I participate in as much as I can. The subject of the forum is a fairly broad topic, but I made it a niche by targeting the forum to just my state.
I am developing the forum with phpBB and it is very simple to work with. One thing that I noticed with most of the forums I researched is that 9 out of 10 were very basic in terms of design. It took less than an hour to add some mods and get the site live including a logo header.
The forum has been up for just 2 days, is not indexed and I already have 9 new members. These new members were from a blogger that I emailed who wrote a quick post about it. I plan on monetizing it with Adsense and affiliate links tied to the niche.
I’m not sure if anyone else has tried this avenue of development, but if you have, please share your experience. I’ll be sure to update this post in a few months with further feedback and let you know if I would consider another one.
5 Responses to “Site Development With a Forum”
Forums are a valid way to go but there is a catch. They have to be monitored carefully and they in general do not convert well. So spammers love forums and therefore you have to spend a lot of time monitoring and dealing with spammers and troublesome users. Make sure you have good TOS at the beginning.
Secondly for some reason, people who visit forums do not click on ads much. Unless you can create something so valuable and unique that you can turn to a subscription model, it can be tough to make money.
The attraction of mini-sites is that they require minimal monitoring and can be done on your own timeline, as opposed to your forum members timeline.
There are very successful forums out there though so don’t let that stop you.
All the best
Barry
Thanks for the tips Barry. I can definitely see how a forum can be a spam magnet. I’m going to give this one a shot. If it becomes a fruitless, maintenance problem I’ll trash it.
I have developed about a dozen mini sites so far. My only problem with a mini site is finding the time to write the content. I have a Twitter follower called webmasterlabor.com that does content writing that I might try. Anyone ever had any luck with this type of service?
(BTW if your reading this and haven’t been to Barry’s site PredictiveDomaining.com you need to check it out. He has some great articles.)
I’ve been using the services of a great web copywriter for some time now, and highly recommend her writing. Check out Jen Rotman’s blog at http://jrotman.wordpress.com/ . Let me tell you, it is tough to find a copywriter that is professional, SEO savvy, has a fresh writing style, and specializes in web-copy — she’s got it all.
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Hi Barry,
Good article, and i LOVE new ideas and enthusiasm that you show in this article. For what we do at WhyPark, we are a “backend” for your forum that will assist in bringing relevant articles to your forum and you can promote your forum off your other domains with WhyPark (or your own) content, or vice versa. This way, your forum builds up relevant content, stays current, looks like a full website for your niche (we advise our users to think of unusual keyword phrasings to win SE PR). Some people think that comments and article content is enough to push your site to the forefront, but that’s not true. You need to back up your forum with a “satellite” website where you provide outside info, original info, and commments in freeform to draw in the SE crawling.
Hook up your forum to a series of WhyPark pages with niche domain variations and then see how your traffic builds!
NOTE: I represent WhyPark.com
Thanks for letting me make this comment.
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