Ingot Tree

There has been quite some hype about bloggers making loads of money from advertisements. See Blogging for big bucks. The formula is simple. Write enough interesting stuff, people will read your blog. Enough people read your blog, advertisers will pay you for some advertising space.

But (good) blogging is hard work. Fail to accomplish Step One and there's no gold at the end of the rainbow. Enter the forum. What's more clever (and interesting) is having a website which content feeds itself or is fed by its readers. The money-making formula for online forums is similar to blogs' save for Step One. Instead of writing interesting stuff, you choose an interesting topic that begs discussion and market your website as THE place to have these discussions. Once established, the readers provide the content, the traffic snowballs and advertisement money floods in.



Two examples that come to mind are www.sgcarmart.com and www.singaporebrides.com. Both have established themselves as virtually THE place to go to check out the latest information.




SG Carmarts is now synonymous with online used car classifieds in Singapore. SingaporeBrides is where frenzied brides-to-be go to discuss where better to splurge on (some would say unnecessary) frills for that Big day. The beauty is that the public provide the content while the site owners rake in the dough.






Another key example is www.hardwarezone.com. I think just about anyone in Singapore (and possibly Asia) wanting to build his own pc or check up the latest prices and reviews of techno gizmos goes there to read fellow consumers' reviews on the product discussion forum. I just read today that its owner Hardware Zone Pte Ltd has been bought over by Singapore Press Holdings for a whopping S$7.1m.

How do I install a forum feature on this blog?

Categories: internet, forum, blog, money, advertisement, content, provider, member, sg, carmart, singaporebrides, hardwarezone