Monetising a Forum - Advice please!

[Lucky Luke]

Hi Everyone,

I have a pair of domain names I'd like to put a website(s) onto. They are both .co.uk and they are: careeradvice and careersadvice. (I have the hyphenated too.)

The government provides loads of static web info (plus telephone support, etc) for careers advice, so my competition is big and well-established.

I need to do something different so that I am not just an under-funded me-too website on a good domain name.

A decent careers-advice forum is missing from the UK web, so I could set up one of these. I know that Forums are hardwork, so there has to be a decent payback. What types of revenue streams are possible from Forums and what are people's general views about this as an approach to using these two domains?

(The domains are parked at moment and generate about £50 pcm. UK exacts on 'careers advice' 49,500 pcm @ £1.63cpc and for career advice the GKT data is unreliable at 1,000,000 UK exacts.... I wish!)

Many thanks indeed, Luke

 

[RSK3000]

I looked into this. Obviously this is a popular niche, but monetising is always going to be the tricky part. This is because generally, forums get regular visitors who are there to chat, and develop a sort of blindness to ads over time. All the usual monetisation options are there of course - career books from Amazon seem particularly appropriate, obviously.

The advice I received also was to have the forum as the front page rather than hidden inside your site. This helps turn visitors into members.

If I was developing this domain I would develop a blog with career related articles, and develop a newsletter. That way I could sell ad space on the newsletter which would generate more £££££ over the longer term.

See what these people have done................http://www.careershifters.org/

Also..........Best forum advice site.....http://www.communityspark.com/

 

[accelerator]

If you're really going to take this seriously then I would say best monetisation would be via selling advertising space direct to advertisers. You do have a great domain to start your site on, I would probably use careersadvice as the main name. Good content would be explaining the pros and cons of various careers, plus interviews with people actually in those careers. At lot of work would be involved to make it work, but it might just be worth it, especially with that domain name.

Rgds