I own two forums and to be blunt with you, you need to ask yourself a question. Are you in this forum thing for money or for passion? It's best to set your expectations at first since if you choose both, that will be the perfect answer, but most average will answer the money thing.
At the start of your community forum, set it on you mind that before you start on the project, you save a little money for yourself and for the community to keep it going, I would say that you invest a good domain name, most probably hosted on a paid hosting account. Why? It's because you are building an image first and your goal is to achieve your passion.
What thing or activity that you can do and almost you can do as long as you live? My answer to that is I write and write.
Determine what is that for you, as I've already said my passion is to write.
Make it your goal to establish yourself first as a writer on a forum owned by you with no members and audience but by you alone. Generate traffic, have your forum listed on google, bing and yahoo. Get it indexed first on the search engines, first things first. Put it on forum, blog about it, post ads about it, make a youtube video about it, since youtube always lists your site on google, well now you know.
1. Get traffic to it first.
First things first, you need to write a lot of content on it, content is still king on the internet. Write , write and write about that passion of yours until you squeeze all the mind power you have on it. Let them come, invite here and invite there, people that you know that has the same passion as yours.
2. Then go for ads.
Make sure you have like an ample amount of visitors to your forum, like how many visitors per day. Keep on doing what you're doing. Invite, write, promote, write.. It's an ongoing thing. If this thing fails, then go for another, but keep on doing the basic things I mentioned in no. 1. Remember, to give yourself a chance first, who will join a forum if there's no capabilities or functions, load it with stuff with mods and extensions. I for one, until now like phpbb and vbforum, but you have to choose first what forum software that you're going to be expert at in modding and updating. Then based on my experience, offers will come in the email, make sure you do a research first if these companies presenting you their offers are legit and not scammers.
So that's it, to answer your question and expect more visitors and contents, then expect advertisers. For some, ad companies, you have to apply with them. Google adsense is not the only company out there, there are so many.
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