Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is the difference between 1,000 unique hits that cost you $.08 each, or 1,000 unique hits that were free. If you optimize your website that that it appears high in the search engine results, traffic will begin to pour in. And, as the old adage goes, “where there is traffic, there is money.”
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Forums have been around since the dawn of the internet, and even before that (albeit, in a slightly different form). Whoever thought of the idea of creating an internet forum was a genius, as there is no easier way to develop an online community that shares the same communal values and interests.

The key to making money online comes down to targeted traffic, trust, and necessity. If you are an affiliate, you may opt to create an authorative landing site for an affiliate offer, showing the end user a positive experience that is more likely to result in a conversion.

An internet forum is kind of like a large conference hall: thousands of individual people all voicing their thoughts and opinions about common interests. As an affiliate marketer, it would make sense to try and grow a forum around a series of affiliate offers, as people who participate are also likely to convert.

If you are running an offer for Cars.com, placing the offers creatives on your automotive themed forum is much more likely to convert than simply scattering the links around various websites. This is due to three things:

1. Mentality. Someone who is active in a similarly themed forum is more likely to become a conversion simply because they are more familiar with the offer.
2. Interest. You never know the mindset of your forums members, and placing offers that are relevant to their known interests (the forum topic) is more likely to result in a conversion. Users may be seeking various aspects of the niche at any given time, so catering to those needs is a win/win for all parties involved.
3. Trust. Active members of your forum are going to have more trust in the forum than some random landing site. This can work out to your advantage.

Case Study
A prime example of this type of monetization is PhenForum, a community based website about weight loss pills. The developer of PhenForum is a very smart marketer, as developing a community around one of the most lucrative markets in the world was a very smart way to develop an income.

PhenForum actively encourages its users to share weight loss stories, success, and failures, as well as experiences with various weight loss supplements. It also has affiliate links to various types of weight loss supplements, such as Phentramin. Through active encouragement of its user base, as well as clever SEO techniques, PhenForum is one of the top search results for many keywords and generates thousands of dollars per month in revenue.

Proven Success - Yours to Achieve
Starting a forum is almost identical to starting a website: you need to create the actual page, develop traffic, and generate an active user base. An internet forum will start to grow on its own as your forum attracts new members- word of mouth and viral marketing can bring in big results once they get going.

After a few e-mails from people who are looking for a step by step tutorial on how to make money I’ve decided to talk about one of the methods that I recommend to newbies that does well and doesn’t cost much to start up. 

What You’ll Need:

• An account at a reputable CPA network.  I recommend ourfreestuff.net since I’m an affiliate manager with them, but really any CPA network will do so long as they are reliable and reputable.  Also, make sure that you can contact your affiliate manager easily.
• Web hosting.  Get a top-level domain name that can be used for nearly anything.  I like to use “media” or “marketing” names (www.salvomedia.com, for example) as a subdomain can be added and not look fishy in the eyes of the users (ie- freewii.salvomedia.com). 
• Basic HTML and knowlege.  If you don’t know any HTML at all check out www.htmlgoodies.com and read up untl youi’re comfortable with it.
• A Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing account.  You’re going to be running some PPC ads, so get an account and desposit $50 or so into it.

The Method:

First, this method does not have longevity each time you do it.   In other words, once you start doing it you’ll have to continue to do it in order to maintain your income.  That being said, it only really takesd about an hour to get set up.  I’ve been able to milk around $1,500 to $2,000 a pop out of this method over the course of a couple of weeks each time I impliment it, but your results may vary.

1. Read the newspaper, watch the news, and generally stay up to date with current events.  Look for big stuff (remember Micheal Vick and his dogfighting ring?) that lots of people will be searching for online.  This is going to be your meal ticket.
2. Once you have something juicy (ie- Paris Hilton getting into another car accident), make a quick survey page.  The purpose of this survey page is to direct to an affiliate offer.  Your survey page should basically say something like “Is Paris Hilton a Bad Driver?  Vote for your chance to win INSERT OFFER HERE“.  Both answers (yes and no) will redirect your simple and easy affiliate offer.  Mobile, e-mail, and zip-submits are all good for this.
3. Set up your keywords.  Make sure that they are all related to current events and that your CPC’s are about 5% of the offer payout.
4. Test, test, test!  If you find that after 200 clicks you haven’t had a conversion you know that something is up.  Test your tracking and make sure it’s working properly!

That’s it, it’s THAT easy!

Income Potential:

You could easily make $500 a day doing this, but keep in mind that search volume will trail off drastically as the news gets old.  For some quick cash, this method can’t be beat!

Misc.:

Obviously, use a top-level domain that is somewhat relevant to the news.  Test your tracking, make sure that your keywords are targeted, and generally use a bit of common sense here.

Many people don’t realize that there is an additional effective way to generate traffic besides using PPC, link exchanges and e-mail.  It can be a strange concept at first - you can pay someone to “deliver” qualified, targeted Web surfers to your site?  Where do these people come from?

Here’s the deal.

There are suppliers who exist in the online business world solely to deliver traffic to other Web sites.  They can do it in a number of ways - most commonly, for example, they own a network of sites that already get a substantial amount of traffic, and using a variety of methods they can send organic traffic to other sites.

Let’s look at expired domains for example.  These are domains, for one reason or another, that were not renewed by the previous owner.  If they are still receiving a small amount of traffic, a supplier may see this and buy up the domain (they’re so cheap nowadays, why not?).  The supplier might then slap a portal-like page on the site (example: www.webtraffic.com), that links off to other sites of similar topics compared to the original site or domain name.  The key for these suppliers is to buy up LOTS of these sites so they can cover virtually any topic possible.  That way when you want to pay them to drive traffic to their site, they can pull up 100 sites of similar topics (e.g. clothing, books, dog bones, etc.) and put your link into the rotation there.  And now you’re receiving traffic.

From my experience, depending on how targeted I wanted the traffic to be, the visitors would flow in at variable rates.  For example, for one of my sites I wanted only UK visitors to see it because I knew that would yield the highest conversions (I was selling a product geared toward people in England).  I used Revisitors for this particular campaign (and subsequent campaigns) because they gave me the most flexibility in terms of how targeted I wanted my traffic.  Plus the campaigns easily paid for themselves because I sold products and services with a fairly high CPA (cost per acquisition).  By targeting specific demographics, traffic came into the site noticeably slower than my other campaigns, but I knew it was worth it because each visitor was coming from a UK address to possibly buy a UK service.  You can verify the traffic sources using a free tool like Google Analytics which will analyze your access logs and tell you exactly what countries the visitors are coming from (among many other useful metrics).
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Ahh yes, arbitrage. The business model that was where it was supposed to be for just under a year and then… crash. Google certainly put the brakes on that one, didn’t they?

Or, at least, so you think. Whether you are willing to believe it or not, thousands of people are still making good money with MFA websites and arbitrage tactics. Let’s face it- the business model, when applied right, becomes a license to print money. Who wouldn’t get in on that kind of simplicity?
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