Hello, I am planning to start a forum of my own, I would like to know, that how much time would it take for a forum to be a big Success, taking into consideration, that there is quite a lot of competition.? And also how much effort do I need to put in, in terms of daily hours. Thanks for helping.
My forum is going on 10 months old. I put in a good 5 hours each day and it's really started to pay off. I also invested a good bit of money into my site, so I think thats what really help me give it a boost.
Can you give me the url of your forum, you have 3 in your sig? Do you mind if I ask how much you invested, and in what? PM me if you dont want this to be public. Thanks for the help.
The site i'm talking about is http://www.degrassiforum.com/forum/ To get the forum started I paid $150 - $200 in forum posting services. Over the months i've spent $300 in advertising. When the site started in Sept 2005 it was running on a VPS. By Feb 2006 a vps couldn't handle the site it was maxing out, so now it's on a dedicated server. I didn't think I would out grow a VPS so fast, so that was one area I failed in because I didn't plan for it to grow so fast and didn't have money put away for this. So just a little tip, expect the unexpected . Somethings on my site are custom, so that pulls members in a lot. If you can find the time, learn a little about PHP and MySQL so you can make scripts. Also look into SEO for your forum, I think because I started out using an SEO hack for vBulletin, it's help with the search ranks a lot. This was the first time I spent money on a site and it proves that investing money to get it off the ground really is worth it. If you any other questions, feel free to PM me.
Thanks a lot Mayers! Your message has been a great source of inspiration for me! If you have time, can you please clear my doubts, it would be of great help. Thanks a lot in advance. 1. You said you had put up some custom things in the forum, can you please give an example. 2. did you start off with vbulletin or a free board and then move over to Vbulletin. 3. Does, paid posting actually help? To start off? 4. What kind of advertising did you do? Was it Google Adwords? 5. Did you have any competition when you started the forums, i.e. were there any other forums on the same topic.? Once, again, you have been of great help. Thanks a billion!
I'll take the time now and reply . 1. There are two things that have made my site a hit. The download center was the first thing I added. There's a few download hacks over at vBulletin.org, but they didn't fit my needs. So I was already in the middle of learning PHP so this helpped me a great deal. The second custom thing is my Story script. It allows members to start stories and others come and addon to it. This wasn't an original idea, but I have yet to see any vbulletin forums running anything that acts the same as me script. These two things alone set my forum apart from all the other vBulletin forums. I'll be adding more custom things over the summer aswell. If you don't have the time to learn PHP, you can always look into paying someone to make scripts for you. 2. I started off with vBulletin from day 1. I've always had better luck getting a forum off the ground when I start vBulletin. 3. Yes it really does, but you really need to time it right. The first time I did paid posting, I did it just to see how good the company was. After that the first time of paying for posts I noticed traffic picked up really fast. So I paid for more posts, and people saw the forum was starting to get active and they registered. Now I don't do any paid post, the members posts a lot of the content thats on there now. If you want, PM me and i'll give links to some paid posting sites I used on that site. 4. I did it on a friends site. He owns a ton of forums that are large so that banners on his site really did help with the traffic. 5. Yes there was competition site when I started. Infact the name of that site was called Degrassi Boards (and mine is called Degrassi Forum ), it's about two years old when I started my site. I centered my site around things that the "competition site" wouldn't do or things I thought I could do better at, I think it is one of the things that help get the site moving. At one point one of my members posted this, so I guess I was doing something right for him to post that and others agree with him. My site isn't has big as that one because it's older, but on Google, Yahoo and MSN depending on the keyword my site displays higher then that "competition" site. One thing i've really try to stress with my members is I try not to make it a "competition", I just listen to my members and work with them to give them some of the things they request. Marc
well it depends . if you aer willing to make forum for paid posting then for it you should have a big money otherwise you will be down ,.... so it will take about an year tobe a big hit.
depends on your promotions and way you market it. 6 months to 1 year should be given atleast to establish a forum.