What is the best way to monetize a forum?

[ScottHughes]

What is the best way to monetize a forum? What do you think?

[m1k30rz]

Well positioned adsense ads can be a great help, also getting sponsors for your categories, and selling sticky posts and signature links.

Off the top of my head I think they would be the best ways

[FunSiteMaker]

Throw on some adsense ads, Also approach people if they want to advertise on your site with Banners This is how I am earning over $200 a month!!

[TheBes7]

[I am earning over $200 a month!!]
Wow dude .. how do you earn so much ? What's your secret?

[teoxy]

That;s not really much. if you are good at marketing you can earn at least 1000$ . also nothing comes without investment... so just set a buget and try to manage it well

[m1k30rz]

^^ Some really good advice, Keep working at your site and invest in some advertising of your own, if you play your cards right you will see some good results

[gamer]

Adsense is the way to make money from forums but make sure that your forum has great contents and enough members. Or else you will be stuck at $60 adsense earnings from your forums like me.

[sensovision]

I strongly believe that it's really depend from the forum topic, it's name and domain. As if you got domain with keywords, name which exactly reflect main theme of your forum and there are not much offtopics than ads displayed on the forum would be well matched and you'll got good income.
Otherwise if something of this isn't match explicitly to your site or you have dynamic domains which are tricky to crawl for Adsence bot than you'll got a lot of unrelated ads with low CTR.

[powerlifer123]

Word of mouth is often the best way ive found when advertising anything but getting relavant links from related content websites can help greatly.

Getting lots of traffic is a start you will see an increase in ad clicks just from that but getting them to come back often is the harder bit which you will have to offer fresh content i.e new posts on related topics or new articles/content