Anybody earning a decent income from their forum?

I've read about a few people who made a living off their forum, but I never actually met someone who did it. The forum I'm working on is still fairly new, and I'm wondering what the potential is. Is it just a labor of love?

 

Yup.

 

Mines under 3 months old and has no revenue yet, actually im waiting a litte while longer to put ads on it until i get more visitors.
I believe hard work and determination can at least net you a nice amount of pocket change each month.

Any extra income is better than none at all though.

 

I respect all of you guys and hope to be there one day myself. I just bought another server and I will have it online next week. And then I plan on building a portfolio from there. And then maybe one day I will be on the beach enjoying a nice ice cold drink and managing my forums.

Greg

 

I haven't earned much from my forum till now. I have earned total of 3.50$ from adsense from 4 of my sites

 

Do you believe in monetization from the start then or would you build up a base first?

 

I haven't earned much to be honest, I used to have adsense, but before I could collect the money I got banned :/
Now I'm earning literally nothing with my current adverts.
Been looking for some other ideas to earn money but no hope :/

 

I wish I did. But at present, the amount of money I make from my sites is basically just some nice pocket change. Albeit potentially enough to just about pay the hosting fees.

 

I can live on forum income, however I do own and run two other full time businesses. Zero adsense revenue.

 

I've been working up to full-time for the past couple of years and hope to make the switch next March.

 

My forum is a hobby forum and is completely non-profit. It carries no adverts whatsoever.

I take voluntary donations from members which generally will cover about 50% of the actual costs of running the site. People pay me to carry out my hobby, I'm quite happy with that.

 

I have never actually had any good success with forums. I've made money off blogs but I've never had any success with forums. I think there's more opportunities with blogs, there's sites like PostLoop which allow you to post articles on your blog and get paid, so you're getting paid $5-$500 just to basically post an article on your blog, which is good money considering you could do multiple a day.

 

Mainly through donations and direct advertising sales, I earn about $100 more than what I pay for hosting and domain costs each month. Its not a huge profit but it pays the bills and some. I use the profit mainly to put back into the forums for contests, advertising and so on.

 

For those reading this and wondering.... The first rule to making money with your forum is TRAFFIC.

The more traffic you have, the easier it is to make money and the more revenue you can generate. So your first concern always should be how to keep new people coming to your site and keep them coming back.

That is the magic formula. There are no shortcuts.

 

100% Agreed

 

nope, it would be cool, but nope

 

Been doing it full time since 2000, part time prior to that since 1996.