Learning from the failue of Earnersforum & Publisherforums
Earnersforum and publisherforums are webmaster forums that were lauched in the Spring of 2006. Maybe you have heard of these forums if you’re a member of siteoint. Earnersforum is headed by so called ‘forum jedi’ Lee Dodd while publisherforums is run by poker guru tyler cruz. While both forums started out strong, like wickedfire posting activity has substancially declined in the past year. Publisherforums is stagnant while activity earnersforum has slowed to a trickle.
So why did these forums fail? Both forums are run by savy internet marketers and were heavily promoted upon their inception. In addition, lavish contests were held where posters could win thousands of dollars as well as various gizmos like Playstations and Nintendo Wii’s. With all that going for them why have these forums failed?
The reason why publisherforums and earnersforum failed is because they didn’t live up to their premise. The premise of earnersforum and publisherforum upon the launch was to provide a place where webmasters could share tips and advice for making money online. People came to earnersforum to learn how to earn, but the information and discussion fell short of those goals. Subsequently, the members who initially joined the forum got board and slowly left. Members who joined later also grew board and left because the forum failed to deliver what it had promised.
The moderators and admins were also partially to blame. Lee and Tyler know how to make money online, without a doubt, but they failed to impart that knowledge on the forums to a sufficient degree. Posting vague advice about “Original content” and “Social bookmarking” and “Work hard” , and “blogging” generally doesn’t cut it. What members wanted were SPECIFICS such as how many links, how much PR, how to rank, etc. Instead of being fed pablum they wanted concrete knowledge about how to make money online. No amount of contests, hype, and mastery can compensate for drab, regurgitated, unoriginal content.
Another problem is that there are too many webmaster/marketing forums. Digitalpoint and Sitepoint were founded many years ago and had already established a dominant market share before earnersforum and publisherforums launched. Without a truly unique edge or unique selling point a new webmaster forum isn’t going to be able to compete with sitepoint and digitalpoint no matter what. Publisherforums and earnersforum offered nothing original.