Can you make money online with forums is the question? Obviously you can make money online with just about anything. The question is how much time will you invest, and how much maintenance is required. You have to ask yourself what are you willing to put into a forum, just like anything else.

Over the last few weeks I have gotten into one of the laziest slumps I have ever been in. Several factors in my life have caused this, and I have gotten into a rather slow manner of getting things done. This kind of made me think about the upkeep of a forum, and if how my business was based on forums I would be so behind unless I had a solid group of moderators.

Forums can make money no doubt, but use of bandwidth, finding advertisers, and getting members seems like a lot of work. I see forums with thousands of members sell on sites like Sitepoint for so much less than it seems they should be selling for. Then I see a blog which has had very little done to it with very little upkeep sell for the same or more.

If you are someone like me, sometimes it is a challenge to supress ideas. If you have an idea it is really important you weigh the time to manage it and build it, and decide whether the payoff is great enough. For me running a forum is not in my interest.

I think this is so important for new people looking for ways to make money online. because making money blogging is not the only option to take, you really have to decide if it is in your business model to do or not do something. Something I will tell anyone that plans on building something for profit is not to jump in and figure out whether its worth it later. Do the math from the start. Going half the distance only to find that you are investing more work than you wanted is just setting you up for failure, unless your plan was to sell your site whether it be a forum, blog, or some other type of online project.

So for those of you planning to make money on  forum, just be willing to put in lots of time and effort until it takes off. Even then there is no guarantee you will have a very popular forum. It will just take tons of work to find out.