The Key Points of creating a member base community?

We all know your friends and family will help out with posting in your forum. They will help because they are after all your friends and family. They love you unconditionally in good or bad times.

Don't you wish you could have the same from other people in your forums? What makes a forum good enough that people will not only join and post but stay after they get their problems resolved?

 

Well it depends on alot of things. It can be as big as the friendliness of the members to as small as the forum software (atleast for me).

 

HAHAHA I wish my family would post or sign up on some of my sites, they say they will but never get around to it.
I think a forum that they are interested, the topics and there definatly has to be people willing to help answer questions and to chat wiht

 

Same here! But hey I get a few posts here and there but the effort of reminding them to post outweighs the fact that they are not posting.

What do you guys think of professsional pay per post services?

 

If they have some common interest, they will post or you should offer them some incentive

 

Successful communities have members that WANT to post as they are really interested in that particular topic. That's why I don't have much faith in paid posters

 

Yeah thats true. how ever paying someone will give them the WANT to post on the website.

I just need to somehow increase member incentive.

 

Give the members what they want... That has to be the most important thing you can do.

 

Yeah but they won't return after you stop paying them

 

If all your forum does is solve their problems - then of course once the problem is solved they are going to disappear.

You need to have other aspects to the forum so they don't wait till they have a problem. Take DP for example, they offer several things:

• SEO Tools
• For Sale section (interesting even when I have no intention of buying)
• Jobs offered
• Revenue sharing (why post on another forum that doesn't offer this).
• Blog

Sitepoint also publishes articles as well as having a forum.

 

Thanks for your input, burgerking.

What is your opinion about the website's address and portals? Should the website be like Yahoo.com where it shows a portal and links to everything or should it be like google where it goes straight to the point then you can visit other links within the sites if you wanted to?

I'm also in a dilemma if whether I should use vbulletin as my CMS or have a separate Drupal CMS to hold my articles and content.