Business Model Discussion: Building tons of surfer forums?
 

Any webmasters here do the following?

1) Finding surfer demographics that have high PPC potential

2) Building mainstream forums focused on this demographic

3) Seeding the forums with paid posters and paid articles

4) Promoting the forums aggressively

5) Retaining and encouraging members to posts through paid posters

6) INTEGRATING the user-created content with high value content areas like blogs/article bases/interest-specific portals.

Share your experiences. If anyone needs help with this, contact me to discuss labor logistics and guerilla promotion strategies... :thumbsup

Bump for adult to mainstream webmasters.

My troll posts get way more replies :(

Yeah, franck. Maybe the time has come for us to collaborate on an ALL TROLL board project--mainstream, of course. :thumbsup :winkwink:

I wonder how an ALL TROLL surfer forum would play out.... of course, it has to piss off/engage the right high paying PPC market segment. :1orglaugh

sounds like a lot of work to me.

That is where cheap labor comes in :thumbsup

already own a surfer forum thats doing GREAT for us

Been pushing a mainstream forum since December 1st now. I have maybe about 18 members which 15 of them are me lol. But people come and go, bookmark and click the google adsense ads. I am averageing 67 cents a click so far . Cant wait for the big traffic to come... :thumbsup

great idea! :thumbsup

sounds good

it should generate traffic

Nice. I wonder if a very entertaining TROLL board would get tons of bookmarkers and ad clickers :)

The answer is yes. Entertainment factor plus something usefull will make money as long as it can get proper marketing. Take GFY for a prime example.

there's no money in that :)
no need to try it....

Isn't that what they say about SE's and blogs? :winkwink:

I tried it and failed. With a hosting talk forum.
Guess the market was too saturated or didn't pushed it enough.

May I ask which chat you're using for the forum?

Chat boards only work if you can find mindless fools to be moderators for free, with the caveat that you will have to manage them at least from time to time to keep them from becoming kings and queens and pissing people off.

It works for some people - but the amount of actual hourly labor involved can get pretty high.

Alex

adsense on boards wont make you significant money. Target a single good category, get your board big and contact companies in the area to advertise on it.

Very good point, Alex.

bump for u!

I'm not looking at xxxx.domain.com type subforums but forums that are small and have a tightly defined identity. Basically, very tight resource sites for highly selective high value traffic.

that's right. no money in that either :)

I have done this successfuly for years,

I chit chat with you if you like.

Hi Xanx, thanks! Much appreciated! :thumbsup

One thing I've noticed about many boards though is that from an advertiser's perspective, they are good mostly for BRANDING. Unless the discussions are about SPECIFIC product reviews and industry issues with actual call to action text and other actionable lead info in the discussions themselves.

Beeing a avid mainstream forum user I don't see how this would result in a way of getting +real users (and all that comes with it).

If the idea is just getting some key placement on SE's and whatnot and get some nice adsense clicks then i see what you are saying.

Well, the challenge is how to make more money with LESS traffic. Sniper shot vs. shotgun blast.

love your sig man :)

I can see that it could bring in a lot of clicks and money.

one trick is making sure you have an option for very cheap advertising. For instance I use a system that drops google style text links under every pic and video at random. The views are amazingly high and I only charge 10.00 for three months for someone to have their text link in there.

It's a very good bargain, so much so that members would buy paid spots for stuff like poking fun at other members and stuff like that. The site does well just in the pure numbers of people buying the links. It's a win/win for all involved.

Now don't expect to retire off that, you will need other methods of income but that one works very well.

We run local message boards with our local dating portals ... one of them have 100k + posts ... never moderated... not having any problem with it either