Online forums have helped many internet marketers to make real cool money with little effort on their part. Smart people all over the world make their money by providing solutions to other people’s problem, what one sees as a problem, another sees as opportunity and avenue to make money. When you make money in your venture and effort to help other people become better, I think that is a good move, it is not bad if you sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labour.
Online forums are a community of people who belong to the same discussion board to discourse common issue of mutual interest. It is a meeting place for open discussion, other names for forum include discussion group, discussion boards. You can make money from forums whether you are the one who owns it or not. A very smart member of a forum may be so good as to be able to rake in more money even than the Administrator or any of the Moderators.
Examples of forum:
Warriorforum – The greatest or largest internet business forum on planet earth. And so on, use Google search to find out more forums of your interest.
All you need to do is type your area of interest, e.g dog owners forum in the search area of Google, you will receive more result than you can handle. The first decision to make if you want to prosper through forum is to choose the forums you want to actively participate in. Register for free, most of the forums are free anyway, and start posting.
Benefits of joining a forum:
Interactivity
Establishing your expertise
Credibility
Social Community i.e becoming a member of a team
Get product ideas
Trade opportunities
Get traffic to your blog or website if you are a webmaster.
There is power in been part of a community. My best community on the internet is a forum that caters for my online business, takes care of my social interaction and so on, every member of the forum feels a sense of belonging, a spirit of oneness that is not in many other internet activities.
There are three basic internet marketing tips everyone who wants to profit from online forum must note.
1. Find a hungry market
2. Discover the major pain or interest
3. Deliver it to them
To find a hungry market, take your interest into consideration, ask yourself
What are you passionate about?
What are your area of interest?
What do you hate?
Consider your past experience, skills, job, or businesses.
Use this knowledge to help you build a solution to the hungry market, find out the solution to the market’s yearning, that’s how to make it in life.
When you join the forum the first thing is to introduce yourself, become a forum investigator immediately by watching out for what many people on the forum lack, what they need, find out what they are hungry for through questions. Use the response triggers to find out. What can I? How do I? Where can I? Are response triggers that when people answer the questions that follows, you will discover their lack, interest or pain.
Having discovered these things, find a good solution to the problem and deliver it to them, pure and simple.
Action plan:
Pick your area of interest today
Decide on the forums to join
Let the forums be in the area of your interest.
Establishing a forum:
I was highly honored when I was called upon by the Administrator of a forum to take up the responsibility of moderating one of the discussion boards. It was a responsibility that exposed me to study and find out the skills of running a forum, and administering it successfully. Thank God for the opportunity, I am able to share with you how to set up your own forum because I allowed the guru to teach me by experience.
Advantages of having your own forum:
You will be seen as an expert, and be consulted for advise, your products will be highly sought after, and that means more money for you.
You can easily build your own list of responsible people member will naturally come back to your forum giving you better chances of earning AdSense revenue. You get quality service from search engines.
What you need to start your own forum:
- Choose a niche for example, marriage, health, football, relationship, politics,…
- Register a domain name that reflect the niche e.g menshealthforum.com
- Buy a hosting package of at least 100MB
- Install your forum with fantastico
How to monetise your own forum:
- Sell your own products and services e.g e-books, audo/video files. It is pretty easy to make audio files, simply go over to Google.com, type audacity in the search box and click search, you will need a headset with a microphone to record your voice.
- Sell other people’s products relating to your niche by joining good affiliate program that gives you reasonable commission.
- Place Google AdSense on your forum to monetise better
- Put text link adverts, go to Google to find out more.
Steps To Installing Your Own Forum:
Type your registered domain name having hosted it with at least 100MB e.g menshealthforum.com/cpanel. In the browser, you will be required to type in your username and password. Your hosting company would have provided you with all these. When the username and password is correctly in place you will be connected instantly to your cpanel.
- Look out for fantastico, you need this to install your forum, and it comes with most of these hosting rights. – Click on the fantastico button
- Click on install discussion board, use simple machine form (smf) board, or any other one of your choice.
- Click on smf under discussion board
- Click on new installation
- Install in a directory called forum, do not install it on the main domain
Administrator name will be your name e.g Adenuga Sunday Joseph, and you choose a password. Click install smf, then click on finish installation.
To create Categories, just go to login, then put in your username and password
For communications category, go to news and newsletters from admin, then create categories from sub-menu boards, go to create new category – let it be closely related to your forum team e.g men’s diet, physical exercise, etc.