Tell me your biggest concern regarding forums and I will give you some goodies

I am working on a home study course about “How to build successful communities” and I just want to make sure I am hitting the topics that you are interested in.

I want to know what are the top 3 questions you have about “building a community”. Here are some: How to get traffic to a forum? How to make your members interact more?

In exchange, I will give you access to my private newsletter where you will find out:
- how to create original content for your forum (I will give away my secret tool that reduce the amount of time I spend creating content by 80%.)
- how to get traffic to a forum
- how to make your members posts

These videos are all part of the course, but I am giving them away to you for free in exchange for your questions.

Reply to this thread with your top 3 questions and I will send you a PM with the url of my newsletter.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

 

Other than traffic and interaction of members my concern is CTR.

I found that CTR on forums is quite less than blogs. I have tried various position of ads on my forums but with little or no improvement. Any ideas?

 

Well, since you've put it that way my three questions are:

What is the best way to populate a forum or in other words how do you give your forum a good kickstart?

How do you stand out from the crowd - how do you make your forum different from all the other ones in a particular niche?

Would you consider using adsense, banner ads or some other type of advertising in order to monetize a forum?

 

Great questions guys! Keep them coming.

 

Ya know, one of the best ways to kick start a forum, keep a kick started forum active, and a way to maintain a healthy userbase and community is to promote discussion. The part of your post I quoted above does NOT do that for this forum in any way shape or form, but does promote your blog through PM and fills up 'yet another useless thread' with nothing but questions and no answers.

 

I would love to know:

1.) How do I get dedicated users (ex: users who come back more than once) to a forum?
2.) What is the best way to monetize a forum?
3.) How do you get members to post?

Thanks a lot.

 

Your CTR isn't lower. You are simply experiencing repeat visitors. Just think. Most blog's traffic comes from a search engine. That means someone searches and your blog post is in the result. So they click the link, read the article and leave. Maybe they will click.

For your forum the traffic will also come from a search engine. The user will search and find one of your forum posts. The user will read the post and then if they like the site they will browse around it. That means you will get multiple ad impressions from one users.

 

well...i'm currently helping to develop a forum (on my sig), and here are the questions that come to my mind?


How do you turn visitors into members?

How do you avoid generational gaps? (often, the "best members" change their priorities and lower their activity, and there is no "fresh blood" to keep it up, and the forum's activity goes down drastically)

How do you eliminate SPAM and Spammers without complicating user registration and not having to modify something that the community is used to? (like PMs, Links in sigs, shoutboxes etc.)

 

1) whats the best way to monetize a forum?
2) are there any secrets to entice members to post more?

 

Hi, Dr. Zun.

I am also into forum building now and I am glad I found your thread because these are my concerns also.

My questions in mind right now are:

1. How do you manage your time being the administrator of the forum if you have other duties offline?

2. What will be your means of getting your members as authentic and genuine as possible? ('coz we know some will have alternics and that sometimes can cause problems.)

3. Will you give your true name and home address to your members and not hide under some usernames or give them the usual "Administrator" title and allow only contact through PMs or email? This question really concerns me because parts of me wants to be unknown, yet I also want my friends to know somehow I managed to have my own community and build it from scratch. What do you think?

Nice study. Hope our names will appear in there also as reference. Kidding.

 

Building and maintaining a vibrant community is no easy task. There are no silver bullets. However, the advice is the same everywhere and for good reason - these things work:

1) Be active on your own forum
2) Engage new people on your forum by asking questions of them
3) Start new threads - good conversation needs a conversation starter
4) Create something unique

The hardest part of growing a forum is getting it off the ground.

 

i am having and managing community with 150++ new registeration per day , 5000++ uniques , 34k members ..
MY CONCERNS :--
==>> Get more & more traffic.
==>> Get more active posters.
==>> Increase members interaction in community via newsletters.
==>> Competition for members involving BEST OF PRIZES.
==>> Getting donations < 200$$ > for server payments.
==>> MOST IMPORTANT.. GETTING THE BEST STAFF POSSIBLE ** STAYING IN TOUCH WITH THEM

 

1. How to get the visitor to register. Especially if the forum is new and there's just a few members and posts.
2. What makes the visitor not to register.
3. How to get the registered visitor to start posting actively.

Thanks!

 

some of the greatest difficulties i faced..

 

1. How to make a profit?
2. How to stop the constant flaming
3. What mods to put on (if it is too much or not)

 

Not sure if you care about redundancy, but my top three are:

1. Keeping members from leaving due to (very occasional) spam
2. Making sure that members stay active after they are done reading the thread that interested them
3. Turning the forum from a hobby into a paying venture

 

My biggest issue has been with getting the traffic to turn around. Around 160 uniques a day turns into a ton of page views but never any sign ups.

 

Has anyone gotten a PM yet?

 

Ok, I'm considering launching some forums and here are the three questions I've got:

1. Is VBSEO really that much better than other forum software that it can justifty such a large price tag when it comes to getting forums off the ground?

2. What's the best way of making the forums appear active when I'm actually in bed at night.

3. How can I get the word out there and encourage people to vist?

 

Nope, not a single one!