Successfully Establishing an Online Forum

[Amirmullick3]

Source -- Rank Above Yourself Successfully Establishing an Online Forum

Every day many webmasters think of starting a forum and making it their business. Unfortunately, research shows that approximately 15% of the forums that start every month are actually able to reach an honorable stage of getting new registrations and posts daily. Being part of that 15% that succeeds is hard work, and this is why starting a forum a decision that should be very well thought out and strong.

There are many major steps that forum starters have to make sure they take so that they can succeed, which means getting at least 5 new registeration, 50 new posts, and at least 10 people online at the same time daily. Important steps include choosing the template and theme, finding reliable hosting, marketing, getting the team, posting, and optimizing & developing.


Reliable Hosting

Forums require a lot of disk space, as more and more people post your server will use up more disk space and bandwidth. Forums need to be up as often as possible, because you have hoards of other forums that your traffic can move onto if you aren’t available often enough for all the posters. Make sure that you are buying hosting from a professional hosting company. For a beginner forum, I would suggest a VPS server. As you rforum becomes more populated and you start experiencing larger post volumes daily, upgrade your hosting.


Marketing

This is the most essential part of making your forum successful. I give credit to WebCosmoForums owner Manik for having let me get the chance of experiencing these marketing techniques in action with him, thank you Manik.

Once you have your forum up and running, start populating it with threads by posting by yourself. Go to a webmaster forum and make a thread saying you want to hire forum posters and that you will pay them 10 cents per post, that is the usual amount. As they help you with good quality threads and posts, keep paying them until you feel that they are liking your forum and that because of them you are also getting other people to register.

Once you feel that there is a fairly good number of people being active (judge this yourself) then start holding contests and stop paying the people that you have hired. They should start posting now simply because they want to post and win the contests, and while competing they will start to admire the forum for maintaining its integrity and paying. As time passes more and more people will start competing in the contests, just market the contest around in multiple forums and your set.

With good contest timing and many members, your forum should start getting flooded with posts very soon. Once you notice a steady number of posts being made, end the contests. This should be in about six to eight months after starting the contests initially. More than likely your average daily post count will start to decrease, but it shouldn’t be a major decrease, especially if you made some of those paid posters into moderators of the forum, because then they will feel a sense of duty in posting on the forum.

Another strategy you can also put into effect to market your forum is buying signature links on forums. This can be against rules on some forums, so be careful. But basically, you should find people who have good average post ratings and buy their signatures on webmaster forums, and the signature links should advertise the contests basically. This will be a good way to rack in a lot of people for contest posting. It’ll be worth the money in the end, because this will also make your forum more famous.
Advertising

AdWords is definitely a great choice when it comes down to advertising your forum. Make sure you know how to use AdWords effectively and everything should go well. You can also buy banner spots on blogs and forums that have a good number of readers and valuable traffic. If this is tied in with the marketing strategies above and done at the same time then you’ll definitely achieve good traffic volumes.

Advertising will be good for any time in the lifespan of your forum. You should start advertising once your forum has at least some posting going on, and you can also advertise once your forum is more renowned as well. How much you advertise and when you advertise all depends on your budget, so plan accordingly. If all goes well, your forum should be very successful in good time. Just be patient.


http://digg.com/business_finance/Suc...n_Online_Forum

[BrainPulse]

great post informative article!!! Amir i digg it you got now 2 dugg!!!

[Amirmullick3]

Thanks a lot govindseo, I appreciate that.

[manu]

Good post thanks for sharing.

[krates98]

you write in a very good manner buddy thanks for this..

[manik]

Nice writeup Amir. Left a comment at your blog

[himoacs]

Nice post Amir.
Hosting is very important for a forum. It is so frustrating to go to a new forum and see that it is not available. When you are new, you want to make sure that everything is perfect.

[BrainPulse]

Thanks a lot govindseo, I appreciate that.

i write a Comment on your post About Amir Mullick but my comment is not approved till now!!!

[Amirmullick3]

i write a Comment on your post About Amir Mullick but my comment is not approved till now!!!

Yea I've been busy, sorry lol, I'll get to it immediately.