Hello, I'm also a forum owner and digitalpoint is a very big forum with many users all the time. Can anyone tell me how digitalpoint became so big? What should one do to get a big forum like this in another niche? I know content is king but so far i'm miles away from here. Thanks, Robby
May be develop some cool softwares for people to use or some other info which people might find interesting in your forum.
Digitalpoint was started after seochat was sold and became overloaded with advertising - seriously affecting access. Back '04 I was still on dialup and seochat was virtually unusable. Shawn obviously felt the same and added this forum onto his existing business domains. Because he already had the respect of many seochat members there was an instant uptake. There weren't many good forums back then and there was a small group of active internet marketers who tended to sign up to any new ones and then see which got traction. Clearly dp did. As for replicating that success - 6 years down the track the whole forum market has matured and it will be alot harder to start one. You either have to have a disaffected user group (as we were) or a user group that has no forum. Good luck finding the latter. You are competing with facebook groups and pages and countless other forums. Think things through very carefully and work out how many users you will need to keep the forum vibrant, and also the hosting costs of a busy server. I have a client with a relatively small forum (hundreds of posts a day as opposed to hundreds an hour) and they have needed to get their own server to cope with the database size, bandwidth etc. Be prepared for those costs! I don't think so. That definitely helped.
The dutch thing gives you both limitations and opportunities. You have a smaller group to target (not one of the major languages) but if there are no other dutch forums in your market then you are all set. People will feel more confident discussing personal issues in their primary language.
Building big forums now days is very hard, and will take a long time to get members signed up and posting...
if you can be unique in any way that will do the job, try to think outside the box, look at your market and see if there are any gaps, and then fill it in and develop a community around it.
Building a big forum might required a long time.. It required a lot member to signup and of course it take a long time to build
We also had a little under 100,000 users using our tools already so it was a support forum for the userbase we already had.
Thanks Shawn, Wow 100.000 visitors allready, that's miles away from me, i'm starting from crap, the forum is now 1 year and i just have 350 members. There must be something to get more visitors. I have a blog, they can post there images, linkpage etc. Any great idea's are more then welcome
And what about servers? What are the costs of for example this forum and what are the revenues. If this is private, i understand, i just want to have an idea what i coul expecting of costs...
I don't know why you are worried about servers when you don't even have a forum. Normal hosting is more than enough for you to start with, until you get more users, then you start thinking about VPS or dedicated servers. I doubt you will get that far anyway so no point thinking so far ahead.
Yes, that can make the difference. And I recollect one quote by one great person Mr. Shiv Khera WINNERS DON'T DO DIFFERENT THINGS. THEY DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY. G!
You have to think outside the box... thats all you need to be successful at doing anything including making big forums.
Thanks for the replies sofar We give advice but i don't think that's enough. What about advertising? Is that an option? Are there big forum owners here that started from nothing?
Advertising will get you people to look at your site, but they aren't going to sign up or come back if you don't have something unique they would be interested in. Just ask yourself why you signed up for sites (like this one).