From what I’ve heard, it’s often hard to make money from a forum.  Like other websites, the owner of a forum has two options to make money – find advertisers who want to reach out to the same group of people who visit the forum or sell the forum once it’s active and has a strong membership.

From my little experience running a niche forum on one of my sites and also from my participation in various forums, the owner needs to get people to contribute regularly, moderate inappropriate or threatening comments, stay on top of software updates, and prevent spammers from taking over.  It’s a lot of work to manage a forum, and it seems that only the biggest and most successful can really earn a living from advertising.

The second best option is the sale of a forum, but that means the owner needs to find someone just as passionate about the topic to evenhandedly moderate and communicate, while not alienating the members who participate regularly. This person not only has to be passionate, but also has to have the capital to make the acquisition and keep it running smoothly.

It seems to be quite a job to manage and monetize a forum, and my gut says many of the small to medium sized forums, despite being active, aren’t monetized very well.

I just read a MarketWatch press release today put out by a company called Crowd Gather to announce its acquistion of Writers.net, “an Internet directory of writers, editors, publishers and literary agents“, which was supposedly founded way back in 1994 (despite its 1995 Whois creation date). It’s a very good domain name and the acquisition shows there is a market for forums.

CrowdGather owns and operates a network of forums, which may be of interest to those of you managing a forum. According to the release, “CrowdGather has created a centralized network to benefit forum members, forum owners and forum advertisers. CrowdGather provides a highly interactive and informational social network for members, a management and revenue-sharing resource for third-party forum owners, and a largely untapped advertising network for marketers worldwide.”

If you happen to want to sell an active forum, you may wish to get in touch with CrowdGather.

If you operate a single website or more than one, you already know that a big challenge is adding fresh, relevant content to your site. You don’t necessarily need to add articles and information to your site every day, but you do need to add new content fairly often.

I want to share a strategy I use to get content on some of my websites. I like to reach out to my advertisers and ask them to send me a guest post on a topic of their choice related to their business. I emphasize that it will receive good placement on the website, and it will also link to their own website. They can send unique articles as often as they’d like, and I will post them as often as they send the articles.

What has happened is that I’ve received some great articles written by experts that are happy to share knowledge and advice. In return, these experts get exposure on a high trafficked website, and they also receive a back link from my website in return. I believe it’s a win/win for both parties, and it’s something you can and should do on your own websites.

I want to share an example of this with you. One advertiser on DogWalker.com owns a pet care company in San Diego. Just about every month, she emails me an article for DogWalker.com, and I post it ASAP. This morning, I was sent an article about traveling with dogs, and I posted it on the site right away. I also used Facebook and Twitter to share the article with others.

This may not bring a lot of traffic, but it’s a topic that is of interest to vacation travelers right now, and perhaps they will learn about the site when they find the article while searching Google. Perhaps they will even need a dog walker while on vacation and use the services of one of the advertisers on my site. However it’s used, it’s something that will attract visitors to the site, and it didn’t cost me anything to create.

If you’re not doing this yet, I really think you should.

Here’s another tip to get traffic to your developed websites, and the cost is virtually free, aside from the time it takes you to actually do it.

We all know that Wikipedia is one of the most highly trafficked websites online. One reason is that it has a ton of content about millions of topics that cover just about everything. Another reason is that it has great search engine rankings, which is likely due to the amount and breadth of the content on the site. I often find Wikipedia outranking some of my own sites for certain topics.

If you review Wikipedia pages associated with the topic of your website, you can add external links to the bottom of Wikipedia pages. For instance, if you own a site that covers Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, you should add a link to the bottom of the main Philadelphia page. You can either call it your domain name .com or embed your link with anchor text. It’s no follow, so you won’t get search engine benefits, but you’ll likely receive traffic.

I would also recommend adding a link to relevant internal pages of your site on “deeper” Wikipedia pages since there will be generally less outbound links on those page than on the main page. For instance, you might want to add a link to your Independence Hall page on the associated Wikipedia page, again with the Philadelphia theme.

In addition to adding links to the external links section, your website can also be used as a reference if you can add information to articles. If you have information on your site that would enhance an article and you happen to be considered an  authoritative  website, you can post the info and link back to your website as the reference. This is great for traffic, too.

You don’t have to be a registered Wikipedia editor to post links, although they will give you more ability to have links stay on the site if you do register. You can’t add too many links all at once, or you’ll be banned for spamming the site.

It’s a good way to get free traffic to your sites.

I’ve been using Stat Counter on many of my websites, in addition to Google Analytics. I pay a total of $49 each quarter for unlimited websites, and I am given a log of 25,000 pageviews in addition to my free 500 pageviews per project log quota. This means I have records of the last 25,000 pageviews, which is very helpful when it comes to watching traffic trends.

Stat Counter recently released an updated version, and the thing I like the most is the search engine traffic analyzer. Instead of simply telling me the entrance keywords for search engine traffic, it actually tells me the position my article is in when the person clicked through to my site. For instance, I saw that I rank #2 in Google for the search “iCloud domain sale.”

I’ve always liked how easy it is to track my visitors’ paths, IP addresses, recent page views…etc, but the new upgrades on StatCounter are impressive to me, and they didn’t even raise the price.

If you operate one or more websites, I recommend you check out and install the free edition of Stat Counter to get the 500 previous pageview logs. You can always upgrade down the road if your usage dictates it, and it’s well worth it for the information that’s given and the easy of accessing the information.