Starting a Forum

You need to seed the forum with posts or recruit posters before you start. An empty forum is worse than no forum at all.

Starting a forum = Hard work (Members + New Posts = Success)

I would not start one without a website that gets decent traffic.

You have to fill the forum somehow with topics / posts before you bring traffic into it. If there isn't any topics / discussions in it, not many people will have any interest in it.
Good luck

As for software, I prefer vBulletin. Or, if you need a free solution, SMF.
Just my personal opinions... There are quite a few other good ones.

You are right to be "concerned". You need both great content and very good
moderating in order for your forum to be successful. And yes, moderating
can be time-consuming, so you need to either do it yourself, or have someone
that you trust do it.

If you don't have those two things taken care of-- If you haven't filled it
with great content, and you don't have a moderator-- Don't even bother
launching or advertising it yet.


Well, the best place to get members (not mere "posters") from is your list.
The second best place is (drum roll please...) from other forums.

Not sure why you think it would "harm the credibility" of your forum
to get posters from your website...? Unless you are talking about
fake posters, which is an utter waste-- Time and effort that should
have been spent attracting real members.

20K hits per month less than 700 per day. Not sure where
that traffic is coming from, but if you don't start with a clean-looking
forum with plenty of great content, you're going to be struggling
uphill the whole time.

Check your niche for competing forums. If the need is already being filled, you're going to have an uphill battle from day one. And if there isn't one, maybe it's because your niche doesn't want one. Don't put one up just because you think it's a good idea. As has already been stated, an empty forum is destined to fail. And a forum with nothing more than a bunch of articles posted by the creator may as well just be a blog.

These are the basic elements that I found to make a new forum successful.

1. Content
2. Posters (either paid or not, just for a start)
3. Contests or games with prizes

Content
You can take the WF as an example.
You will notice that there are posts here by the admin and moderators about various internet marketing topics pretty much similar to articles in a blog.
They're about SEO, PPC, CPA and many more.
If you have a unique niche and I see your content, it's very likely for me to stay long and join the conversation for further knowledge.

Posters
If you go to a forum and see that there no posts, or that there are but it's been a month ago, you probably won't bother signing up to ask what is it you want to ask.
At least make 5 posts on hot sub-forums everyday.

Contests or Games with prizes
If you currently have 20 members (hopefully more ) and you started a contest where the one who has the more posts after a week or two will get cash prize.
1st place say $15 or $20
2nd place $10
3rd place $5

Of course there are lots of other things you must consider but I find these three to always be an important element when starting out a new forum.

Don't listen to some of the advice given about hiring posters. I wanted to start a forum on an area of Internet Marketing which I work in everyday as a way to provide people a place in which to discuss that area of IM specifically without the need to weed through other unrelated posts. I spoke to other successful forum owners, they all told me, don't hire posters or anything artificial because people do realize.

They told me that, most often when starting a forum you'll find yourself mostly participating in your own forum alone or with very few people. It's upto you to create great content for people to read.

You have to make it feel like a good community, or atleast make it look like it could be a good community with a bit of growth. Give people incentives, through rewards or moderation powers. At least to those that seem genuinely interested in being a part of that community and helping others.

They said not to try and monetize it until traffic levels and userbase are huge because it takes away from the forums integrity, and that it can take upto 6months to a year or more to gain traction.

It's a project with long-term results, but it does help to build one on something that doesn't currently have a forum.

I suggest vB personally, and they have great mods that you can add to help with user interaction.

Forum is one of the most difficult IM you would want to start.
I understand that you have a great domain on hand.
I suggest you run a blog with it 1st. Test out the response.

I have recently created a forum, which does not have a lot of active posters. I think I will make it a paid to post forum, where posters will get 2 cents per post.

Ask your friends to join the forum and help build up some posts with useful information in them. I have seen many forums that have only the admin posting away and no one else even to comment on them. Some forum owners use paid forum posting services just so that they can start off the forum with some posts and members.

You should ask for advice, a success forum owner... the warrior forum owner

My advice:: don't start a forum unless you have an audience first. And a substantial one at that.

Getting a forum to the point where there's traction from a standing start = bloody difficult.

Forums are an amazing amount of work. You need at least one other person to moderate while you sleep. About 10 minutes after your first link to it is public, the spam and the xrumer profiles start showing up. Some of it isn't pretty.

It's probably best to go with free forum software at least until the forum gets off to a good start. Most of the paid forum softwares can import from the free ones.

This was a vote by forum owners about the best free software.

http://www.forum-software.org/vote-f...f-2012/results

What's the best forum to run for easy of use and SEO? I hear about these
-vBulletin
-phpBB
-simplemachines

I think vBulletin is the king of forum software. As for running one, they take a whole lot of work and some dedicated moderators. In the beginning when your forum is a ghost town, you may need to hire some posters to get things going. Make sure you want to put in a lot of effort because that's what it'll take.

I don't know that I ever even upgraded to v. 3.x... My forums are so old,
and I never upgrade anything unless there is already a problem.

That is great to know, however... Might save me some serious headaches
in the future!!

maybe why we don't have tapatalk enabled on WF!

how are the buddypress/wordpress forum plugins?

I think buddypress is old? Looks like this is the one About · bbPress.org

looking for SEO feedback too with bbpress if anyone has used it?

Forums start getting picked up by google for alot of subjects and keywords. very powerful sites, and there are ways to monetize them if you have a strong niche and user database.

Yes, moderating a forum is a LOT of work. I'm fortunate enough to have a part-time assistant who logs on to my forum several times a day to sweep it clear of spam. Wally has been doing than since 1998. Where on earth are you going to find someone who wants to do that, 7 days a week?

One thing to be afraid of is the companies which hire unscrupulous forum posters - who often have trouble writing clear English and don't understand your niche - to visit forums blasting out quickly written, rubbishy posts that devalue your forum. You'll need to have a clear battle plan prepared or your forum will be wrecked.

Ideally, you would want 3 moderators working in 3 different time zones to cover different parts of the world during the 24 hours. (I remember seeing a forum once that had a few guest moderators who were "paid" by being given very prominent publicity at the top of the forum.)

And, of course, if you're deleting the rubbish, you need good content to replace it with.

I've found that the click-through rate on AdSense ads is MUCH lower on my forum than on the rest of the site. Forum members seem to be single minded - they come to read and write posts, not click on AdSense ads, or not nearly as often as elsewhere.

You need to figure out how to divert visitors from your forum to your money-making pages and/or your newsletter. Otherwise, people will just visit your forum, probably as one of a list of forums they're visiting as part of a daily marketing schedule, and won't even know the rest of your site exists.

Figure out whether you want your forum links to be straight links or rel="nofollow". I was scared that I was getting too many thousands of links to bad neighborhoods, so a few years ago I switched all forum links to nofollow. However, the disadvantage of that move is that many forum forums are hoping for Google juice from dofollow links, and so if you use nofollow you lose good forum members.

Your moderators need to watch out for hidden links. Spammers sometimes make posts in which a link to an "adult" site is hidden behind a comma or a full stop.

It's not all bad, though. Over the years, my forum has attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors to my site, and I managed to make money from some of them.

For a few years, my forum had an absolutely wonderful forum member who usually visited the forum several times a week and over the years she posted THOUSANDS of friendly, helpful, useful posts - until she was lured away by a company which offered her a full-time job. That was a better offer than the occasional Amazon gift card I sent her to thank her. Note: Figure out a way to reward your best forum members. In some cases, praise and free publicity are enough.

If you like helping people, and writing helpful answers when you could be spending your time more productively making money - or spending that time with a spouse or girlfriend or on a favorite pastime - then a forum could be a good fit for you. If you normally stick at things, a forum could be a good fit. If you're a bit abnormal socially and prefer late-night keyboard contact to the real thing, a forum might be a good fit.

If you succeed in creating a good atmosphere and a forum that people really like visiting and where they feel appreciated, you can create a winner. But if the spammers start winning and your best forum members find somewhere better to go, you can find yourself in a fast, downward spiral.

In short, running a forum takes a lot of work, is risky, and probably isn't the best use of your time. But I still have one.

Good luck!

ecopac: If you ever start it up, I would like to check it out.

I'm a SuperMod on about 10 tech forums, and I use to run a 165k+ member music forum. I love forums; obviously lol

Here's a formula for success:

Gather tons of PLR articles

Chop them up based on questions they ask

Hire outsourced posters at 25 cents a post

Instruct them to use the PLR articles and tweak them to fit a Q + A format and post in such a way as to get a conversation going.

They split their time asking questions and answering

compile a list of twitter questions and post your thread links to those questions you answered

Hi ecopac. I wouldn't worry about the moderating problem till you have a lively forum

But I do have one tip for starting a forum. I've been on a particular forum for 11 years and it started out with a single board and one guy. Every few days he would post long guides and useful info on the niche, then ask for comments and criticisms. He contacted people in his niche and asked them to comment on his long useful informative posts. Of course to comment, you have to sign up and when he replies back to them in the forum, they get an email about it (Make this the default!).

Suddenly a lively discussion breaks out and you can invited known people in the niche to give their 2 cents. Of course then you get people joining in via google and links from other forums/blogs/etc.

If you can write about the niche from a different angle, in a way that makes other people want to join in/oppose you, you can simply invite traffic in.

No idea if it will work for you, but I'd be a million times more likely to join that forum than one with 26 boards filled with spam posts! Why do those guys even bother?

Good luck!

Whoever suggests using vBulletin as a forum software platform...I invite you to check out Xenforo.

I run a wristwatch forum, with both high-end and lower-end watches...we were on vB 4.2.1. Utter crap.

Last week, we switched over to xF...words can't portray how great it is! We went from a system that was plagued with issues and spam, to one that invites one to stay on the forum for a long time.

What sold it for me was being on xF's own forum...it was so easy to use, I kept staying on! I wanted that same experience for my forum members.