Originally Posted by RidinHighSpeeds

Agreed completely.

It is work all the way from the start.

When my forum started becoming active, I thought I was free to not get involved all the time just to keep the forums going. Well, I was wrong. Sure I don't have to post all the time anymore, but people need moderation. People get out of hand on the forums and that could really hurt a community.

Work work work :taz:

I disagree.

It all depends on a number of different factors. For example, I had a forum that I started and worked my *** off on posting articles, promoting, moderating, and adding new features. The forum grew to 4,200 members before it was hacked and destroyed (story for another time).

Around this same period of time, I started a gaming related niche forum for fun just because I saw a need. To my suprise the need was much greater than I had suspected. That forum is now 6,000 members, still quite active (600 uniques per day) and I spend almost NO time on it AT ALL. I have a great team in place including an administrator and 4 moderators who keep the site healthy.

So its all relative, depends on your niche, when/how you start it and how well you can sniff out the right people to put in place for management.

Another thing: Guarantee you Lee could let this site run itself if he wanted. The only real reason he needs to be here is for promotional/marketing purposes(promoting his brand, which is essentially him "lee dodd"), and because he may also be a control freak Also its still too new to let it "spread its wings" and fly on its own. But my point is, if he had to, I think it would fly just fine.

The problem a lot of you are facing and don't realize it is that you're not looking at it from a business perspective.

The topic of this thread is about income. So let's stick to that. The bottom line is yes, you can earn income from forums and no it doesn't "have to be" time consuming.

It's a business so treat it like one. Work hard to launch it and make it grow. When it starts turning a profit don't be greedy and put it all in your pocket. If the site is taking too much of your time and keeping you from growing other things invest in staff. Whether that be hiring an administrator or promoting a super mod to admin and giving him/her free stuff other people have to pay for on the forums.

There's nothing wrong with paying a small staff a modest fee to manage your forum every month if the revenue the forum generates can support it and still leave profit for you. In fact it can even have benefits over having a volunteer staff. Just depends on how you run your forum/business.

I have a sizeable forum as my main site and source of income. Although google adsense provides a rather large check each month, this is only 1/5 of my monthly income. An ecommerce store is 2/5 of the income. Membership subscriptions are 1/10 of the income. The rest of the income comes from direct advertisement from the "big boys" as advertising campaign contracts.

Time involved: Its a business. I run it as such. I have offices to maintain, a few employees to manage the ecommerce aspect and the online forums are managed by a group of volunteer moderators.

My bottom line: I have never thought that money was something that would drop from the sky. "Get rich quick" is not a part of my thought process. I work ethically, intelligently and know that the best investment of my money is in my own projects.