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Hey guys. Its been a wonderful launch. I made one post and got some pretty decent amount of traffic from Digg. Thanks for all the support. Appreciate it! Okay so today let me tell you how you can make some money from a post2host without really investing much.

First let me tell you what a post2host is. Well its a type of free hosting service where you need to make a certain amount of posts on the forum every month in order to keep your free hosting account. Get it? Okay so lets start!

Getting Started

You first need to go look for a cheap reseller hosting. You’ll find tons out there. Go look on DigitalPoint forums for some good deals. Try not to spend more than $10 per month. And also look for some good features like cPanel, FFmpeg, etc. These extra features will act as a magnet.

Now you need to setup a forum. I would suggest using phpBB, SMF or any other free forum software. vBulletin is probably the best forum software but its pretty expensive and the idea is to invest almost nothing. Using a nulled one wouldn’t be a good idea since they will hunt you down and close your site. Its just not worth the hassle.

Get some friends who know about hosting. Ask them to become admins or moderators. You’ll need support. You can’t keep the forum running all by yourself. And you need them from Day 1. Plus make sure that they help you promote it.

Don’t forget a nice domain name. That is really important. So now you can start your forum. First few days you’ll need to do some crazy marketing. And also you guys will need to fill the forum up with some threads. Oh and use cP Creator to automatically open hosting accounts, keep count of posts, etc. Its a lot easier.

Part where the money flows in

Yep its the fun-to-read part. If you were thinking of putting up AdSense then hold that thought. Its going take you ages to make money with AdSense unless you can have a huge amount of traffic. A better idea would be private sponsors.

Edit your forum’s template and make some space for banners: 125×125px and 160×600px. Those 2 sizes should be okay. Now start by offering it for cheap. Like $5 and $10. Increase it later on when you get the forum going. Oh and you could also throw in an AdSense banner somewhere (more money that way).

So now lets say you have a good amount of members and lot of threads/posts. Its been about 6 months to a year. And you made a good amount of money from private sponsors. Now its time to sell it! Wait a sec. Make sure you have like 5000 members at least. The more members you have the better.

And before selling it, take money from people to send out mass emails to your members about the sponsor’s site or product. More money there. Cha ching! Okay that’s enough. Lets sell it already. So how would you sell it? Well go on forums like Digital Point and you’ll find people who are interested in buying your database (since it has all the users and posts). People do that to kick start their own forum.

Don’t just sell the database once. Sell it a few times. Cha ching! Cha ching! And you probably don’t wanna tell your potential buyers that you sold the same database before to a different guy. People want unique and fresh databases.

Now that’s enough. Go find a buyer that wants to buy the thing. Like the post2host service, domain, the forum, etc. Ask for a good amount. Maybe around $500 to $3000. Depending on how much traffic you get and how many active members you have.

Other Random Tips

These are just random tips that I didn’t mention above. I’ll just jot them down below. They might help you.

• Don’t buy a VPS or a dedicated server for the forum. Start by using a free hosting service or host yourself on the reselling server.
• Keep your forums about things related to hosting, web development, SEO, etc. So that people have things to talk about.
• Go to related forums and post about your service. And also add you link in the forum signatures.
• Post about the service at Digital Point, FreeWebspace.net, and other hosting related forums.
• Control the quality of posts. You want to keep a balance between quality and quantity of posts.
• You, yourself need to be every good with hosting stuff.
• Provide quality support. Or else your members will get frustrated and just leave.

Hmm so that’s it for now. I’m done. I think I’ve said everything I had in mind. This should make you a few thousand dollars or more depending on how much you’ve promoted the service, how many active members you have, and how much traffic you get.

I’ll be writing about some crazy marketing tricks and you don’t wanna miss out on that. So subscribe to my feeds or subscribe via email.

There are few things that you should be aware of when you choose your web host. Whether its a free hosting service or a paid one. I think these are pretty important if you care about your site.

Paid Hosting

• See if your host is reliable. Ask a few people about their service. Or you could just Google the web host’s name with a few keyword and see what comes up. You’ll probably get a few blog posts and/or forum discussions about them.
• Keep in mind that you get what you paid for. If your host is giving you a great deal like 50gb of space, 100gb of bandwidth, etc and the price tag is only $3 per month. Then I think your host is overselling (its when you give people more than you can since most customers don’t use all of their resources). And they might not have a good service since their server is packed tight with a lot more users than it can handle. And if a host doesn’t make money how will they stay in business. That means that they might go out of business like a lot of web hosts. So, don’t always go with the cheapest. Look for the one which offers a reliable service at a reasonable price.
• Check if they are a reseller. A reseller is someone or a host which buys a reseller plan from another host and they use the other host’s resources to provide you a web hosting service. Pretty much like pretending to be a web host. Now they might give you a good deal but their service might not be reliable. And anyone with a few extra bucks to spare per month can be a reseller. And so they might not have a good support.
• See how long they have been in the business. So that the next morning you don’t wake up to find your site down and your web host gone. No refund or anything. They probably ran out of business or they ran away with your money.
• Check their Terms and Conditions of Service and their policies and shit. If they are overselling and you use up like 60-90% of your resources then they might close your account and give you some bullshit reason. Why? Because if you use all of your resources then there will be a shortage on the server. Since they rely on resources that have not been used by other customers.
• Good support? Check for that. You need a good reliable support. And before you actually buy one of their hosting plans go chat with the sales rep (if they have a live chat) or email them and see if they are nice and if they type in a formal way or like “ok. we;ll do dat. dont worry about that.” or like “Yes. Sure we can do that for you.”

Free Hosting

• See if they have support. Like even a support forum where the users pretty much help each other.
• I know a guy who had a pretty successful forum and the web host downloaded his database and forum files. And made a clone of his forum and redirected the traffic from the real forum to the clone. And he could have sold the forum database to people (yeah there are people who buy them).
• Reliable? Check for that. You don’t want your site to be down all the time.

So, that’s it for now. I might later make a list of good hosting deals. Both free and paid.