Father Sez

For sometime now, I have been looking for the elusive online business. The one business that would slowly but surely refill my depleted coffers. 

I have been eagerly reading blog posts that talk about online marketing and making money online. I have often thought about subscribing to those repeatedly appearing ads that promise to detail to me in full and complete detail the secrets of the online rich. Somehow I have held back, so far at least.  

Recently I read about a forum being put up for sale. 

This forum, BicaraJutawan.com, is for local entrepreneurs (seems to include quite a number of  budding and wannabes) to network with one another. It has been around since 2005 and the founder is also the owner of a personal finance blog that I follow. I believe he may also own other blogs.

The forum apparently attracts a readership of about 50,000 monthly and with the current increasing interest in entrepreneurship, I am sure the membership is likely to rise and quite steeply at that.  

I have often read the postings in the forum and many of the posts offer sound and useful information based on the personal experiences of those posting. The discussions are mostly in our National Language, Bahasa Malaysia. As it can be expected, the postings once in a while drift away to some irrelevant issue, but in general, I would say that the forum founder does have a strong community. 

I remember reading in Caroline’s blog about the 3 revenue models for making money online. The membership site model (one of these 3), was further elaborated upon by Caroline in a subsequent post.  

I am still a newbie to the online world and still floundering. Yet this does look like a good opportunity. An opportunity to apply to buy over the forum and try to further enhance it with useful resources and later slowly change it to a membership site.  Perhaps also to seek ads which would be relevant and useful to this community without being pain in the neck pop-ups?  

All these would take some time.  

The present owner, Pakdi has almost an iconic presence and it is clear that the community respects him tremendously. He has mighty big shoes that may not be that easy for the next guy to fill.  And not to forget that people in general would rather sign up for a public speech than to pay for information. 

I have not done any research to seek out forums that are successful and that could be used as a benchmark for me to learn from.  

In the meantime, I suggested a joint venture proposal to Pakdi who declined interest, preferring an outright sale.   

This thing is still tingling in my mind. The goat farm has started and the “opening kenduri”, (already postponed twice in April and June) is tomorrow. Let me get the kenduri over and come back to this again. 

In the meantime, if you have any ideas or suggestions it will be very much appreciated.