If I had to identify an area in the online-money-making-world that I believe is grossly neglected yet holds extensive long-term potential I would have to say “forums.”

Why?

First, because forums are so unfairly criticized (I have five and still consider this a big mistake on my part… that number should be far larger). For years I’ve been reading posts and discussions revolving around what type of site someone new (or even old) to the SEO/SEM world should create. About half the time, forums are mentioned as a possibility but are quickly dismissed as unprofitable. “Forums suck! My forum only gets an AdSense CTR of about 0.1%! Meanwhile, my niche, informational sites get a CTR of as high as 35%!” the argument usually goes.

If you’ve never run a forum, this might sound convincing. But it’s not.

Of course the CTR is miniscule. You have guys that spend their entire days on the same site, and they do develop ad blindness. Unlike many search visitors, these regulars are already at the site they want. They typed in the URL. These users load tons of pages and will rarely click any contextual advertisement. The unfortunate mistake, in my opinion, is to think that you should be earning contextual revenue from such users, because they’re already doing you a huge favor. Let’s think about what’s really going on in a forum where a user hangs out all day but never clicks an AdSense advertisement. This user, 99.9% of the time, is posting a lot! My metal forums, for example, have 120,000+ posts and I’ve barely promoted them - the users love to post and they do just that. And what is a forum post? A post, in a very simple sense, is a bunch of words. But, these words are often “expert” and cover a specific (niche) topic. These posts are discussing issues that are on people’s minds, and that they want to know more about. From this perspective, it’s fair to say that such users are creating content for you, for free. The content is often great for SEO (discusses things people search for) and it didn’t require you (the webmaster) to do any keyword research, writing, etc. “Good writing” is expensive. The lowest prices I’ve found for fluent English, and this is certainly dumbed-down borderline spammy English, is $.02 per word. This price, depending on where you look, can be as high as $.25 per word or even more (If you don’t believe me go check out some sites like elance.com). Connecting the dots here shows that although you aren’t assigning the writing to your forum users directly, or placing an order, you are still getting content of monetary value for free every time someone posts. The only costs I can think of at the moment are your bandwidth, the domain, and your time in setting up and/or moderating the forum (although this last ‘cost’ is almost always delegated to volunteers).

In addition to the free content, loyal users will often link to you from their signatures in other places: their blogs, homepages, other forums, whatever. Again, this is something that can easily be translated to monetary terms (e.g. text-link-ads.com).

Finally, creating a forum sits well with your conscience. You’re creating something “good”—not a questionable, perhaps low quality site about a topic you don’t really know a lot about. You’re creating a platform people can use and enjoy to discuss topics they’re interested in. In other words, you’re giving people exactly what they want and in many cases I don’t think it would be an overstatement to say you’re making their lives better.

To borrow a quote from Thank You for Smoking, “the job’s almost done for us!”

Building sites that are useful and that grow on their own—without your constant contribution and oversight—is a formula for success. Once you have the traffic there are lots of ways to monetize it (click here for a podcast where Shoemoney and Lee Dodd discuss the monetization of forums), so don’t let a poorly interpreted low CTR statistic impede your judgment. And it’s not too late, by any means—there’s still room for quite a few more forums :).

PS: Although I’m sure most of my readers are well aware, for completeness I have to strongly recommend vBulletin. You can be up and running in less than an hour, even with no prior experience.