Which is Financially Rewarding a Blog or a Forum?

[Mika]

I have a blog that earns me some money. I also created a forum, monetized it and tried earn from the forum. I failed to do so, therefore, I sold the forum.

In this post, I will try to analyze whether a blog is financially rewarding or a forum based on my experience and observation.

You need a domain and hosting for a blog, and a forum also needs a domain and hosting, so starting cost is the same.

You can use open source CMS for your blog as well as forum, so there is no extra cost attached to your blog or a forum.

If you are a writer, you can create your own blog posts. Even if you are not a writer, you can easily hire writers to write on your blog.

Forums need members, and these members need regular posters. Just like on a blog, you cannot do it on your own. You need members. Unlike on your blog, where you can hire someone to make 30 posts and you can start monetizing your site, forums need a lot of members to create posts. It is quite difficult to bring members on forums. You might have to pay to post. This can cost you a lot of money.

On the positive site, it is easy to build traffic on forums because when you have members regularly posting on your forum, you can bring regular traffic. When you have traffic, you can start earning. Building traffic and also revenue on a blog is very challenging.

 

[Lens1000]

You have written a very wonderful thread and i have gained a lot of things from it. I have made the decision to create a forum out of my website and it will be embedded inside my website. I think that it should be an avenue to generate traffic. I will start posting there and I can hire people to help me post on the forum and I will give them some money . I think that this should be another way to generate terrific traffic to my website . Would this be effective and What's your opinion about this?

 

[Jasmine]

I have no experience running a forum therefore I cannot say anything about the earning potential of a forum. This is a forum and it is paying the users to create posts, based on the number of active users and activities on the forum, I can assume that the forum is earning really well. Blogs on the other hand can also earn well provided you can bring a lot of traffic to your blog. You can earn through different mediums from network ads and affiliate ads to selling ad space, sponsorship, selling physical and digital products, even selling online courses.

 

[moonchild]

Forum after gaining a substantial amount of users is more profitable because everything is user generated and you do not have to be creating content yourself, which means the only work you will be doing if there is moderating, by moderating the pages you can just hire someone to do it for you, you have build yourself something that can scale easily, blog is a one man business, you might have staff working for you, but you dare not deviate from the main theme of your blog else your audience will leave you.

But a forum, people are different, you can have sections and people will just say what they want, you do not have any rigid theme like say a sports blog or a health blog, If i am to choose , i will choose a forum, I will just have to work more than I will on a blog.