The Fastest Way to $20K with vBSEO - The FireBlades Story

The Fastest Way to $20K with vBSEO - The FireBlades Story


For Keith Cohen, a Senior Programmer Analyst and avid motorcycle enthusiast from Raleigh, North Carolina, starting a vBulletin powered forum about Honda motorcycles (aka Fireblades) was a great way to communicate with other 2-wheel speed junkies.

Using a balance of marketing and tech skills, Keith managed to grow FireBlades.org into a large and growing community. And while he originally created his forum with the sole purpose of building a community of like-minded firebladers, stumbling upon vBSEO became the special factor that turned the forum into a major investment.

Running a large forum can be a time consuming task. Newly married with some student loans still outstanding, Keith decided it was time to turn the forum over to a new owner, freeing up more personal time to share with his wife and putting the money to great use in eliminating their university debts.

In late 2006, fireblades.org sold for $20,000.

Based on typical forum valuations which focus on Web traffic and ad revenue trends, Keith could have collected upwards of $30,000 on the transaction.

But as Keith says, choosing the highest bidder was never his intention. He opted instead to choose a new owner that had the necessary skills to run a successful forum, while also maintaining the character and community values that Keith had built from the ground up.

How much of a role did vBSEO play in building the FireBlades.org investment? A huge role indeed!

Prior to installing vBSEO, Keith was earning $5 or less a day in AdSense revenue.

Within about 8 months of vBSEO optimization, the forum earnings shot up by a factor of between 10-15x times. Keith went from earning $90-$150/month to averaging around $1500/month with vBSEO installed.

It was this huge jump in Web traffic and ad revenue that drove Keith's sales price up into $20,000 to $30,000 range.

At the time of first installing vBSEO, Keith described himself as a newbie to SEO. In fact, he made the decision to install primarily because he liked how the vBSEO CRUs (Content Relevant URLs) looked on other forums... and not so much for the SEO advantages - However, only 8 months later he was very pleasantly surprised!

As you can imagine, the SEO effects provided by vBSEO got Keith's attention real fast. So much so, that he is now a leading expert in the vBSEO solution and has joined the vBSEO Total Support Team. If you are a vBSEO customer and run into any issue whatsoever, chances are good that Keith may be the one to provide you with troubleshooting assistance via the vBSEO forums or support ticket system.

Crawlability Inc. President, Juan Muriente, is very happy to have Keith on board with the vBSEO Total Support Team:

When I extended the offer to have Keith join our support team, I was extremely happy that he accepted. He not only knows our vBSEO solution inside and out, but he also knows firsthand the success that can be experienced by vBSEO-enabled forums. As much as our customers love vBSEO, most customers comment on how excellent our customer support is, and Keith is a big part of that process. He knowledge as a both a tech and a user of vBSEO also makes his team feedback a fantastic source of input on how to continue to evolve vBSEO.

But for Keith, like many others, the vBSEO addiction is a tough one to break.

At the moment, he's working away at building a new forum dedicated to the discussion of the Honda CBR 1100XX Super Blackbird. Keith is already having success with growing the forum and generating search engine traffic.

If you want a model on how to build a successful forum, check out cbrxx.com. What's one big tip for success from Keith? He says "Install vBSEO".



Do you have a vBSEO success story? Please tell us about your experience.

excellent!!!

Wow - amazing. I really enjoy these forum success stories!

Get's me motivated....Yee-haw!!!

Honda Motorcycles - FireBlades.org

Does anyone know the MOD name to get 'new thread' 'search' 'subscribe' 'rss' links next to each forum.

Thanks

Dave.

It was a custom template mod I did....Never released it though.

Bugger, its a sweet MOD.

If you want to earn a few quid let me know.

Dave.

I think someone posted it somewhere... It may have been on vBulletin Setup & Help

Originally Posted by Keith Cohen

I think someone posted it somewhere... It may have been on vBulletin Setup & Help

How did you setup adsense like that on the threads?

Originally Posted by cpvr

How did you setup adsense like that on the threads?

Me ?



and here is a link for the "how to" on [new thread], [rss] etc that I had gotten from Keith some time ago.. http://forum.vbulletinsetup.com/f7/n...be-rss-32.html

There is also a hack at vb.org that does the same thing, that the developer said was cleaner and yadda yadda yadda.. This worked for me, so that's what I used.

Thanks for the plug Keith I must have missed this thread.

cheers

Is it common for forums to be sold for 10-15 times the generated monthly revenue, like this?

Chris

I sure wouldn't sell a forum for less than a year's income given the enormous amount of work it takes to build and grow a successful community.

Yeah, I would think more like 3 years worth of income, but I really have no idea.

Chris

Very inspiring story.

Originally Posted by clarencealston

Very inspiring story.

You could be the next success store Clarence. Do you have a vBulletin powered forum?