Ten Tips To Ramp Up The Success Of Your Online Forum
Leslie is a Freebie Trader and blogger who teaches people to make money with Freebie Trading and beyond on his blog at TheFreebieGuy.net and on his new forum at www.CaliStyle101.com. Leslie is a member of all my programs and recently left some great posts in our members forum about his success with monetizing a forum, so I asked him to write an article for us. Here it is…
Every successful blogger reaches a point where they feel the need to expand their portfolio. Maybe they’ve been able to make a consistent income on a monthly basis, but want to take the next step to increasing their earnings significantly. There are a number of ways to accomplish this. Some bloggers choose to develop products, membership sites or promote higher priced affiliate products. For me, it was adding a forum to my portfolio.
I’m a Freebie Trader. My business revolves around teaching people to make money with Freebie Sites and getting free stuff. The focus of my blog at TheFreebieGuy.net is to show people exactly HOW to do the same. At the beginning of this year, I was approached with the option of buying a Freebie Trading Forum (CaliStyle101.com) at a price I simply couldn’t refuse.
At the time, the forum had approximately 10,000 members, but was in a pretty dormant state. There was essentially no activity. However, there was potential. Regardless of the fact that the members weren’t active, having 10,000 instant members seemed much better than starting from scratch. So I bit the bullet and decided to give it a go.
I knew that if I were to have the forum succeed to the level I wanted it to, I had to do something way different than any other forum I’d ever seen. The result was a revolutionary concept that allowed me to build a profitable and extremely valuable forum in a relatively short period of time. Our alexa rankings went from over 300,000 to approximately 60,000 within 30 days and down to 35,000 in 3 months and membership has almost doubled.
There are many forums out there. However, what you will notice is that most of the forums that are very active are those that have been around for a relatively long time. So I’ve put together a few tips that can help newer forums to break through some of the barriers they might encounter to make a forum that can shoot your forum to the top.
