Ultimate Forum Starting Guide. (Forum Starting, Marketing, etc)

Thanks for this info proximity. I'm just starting out building my first forum and I'm trying to soak up as much info as I can! Any suggestions on how to find people to hire in my niche to get things kicked off? Much appreciated.

 

My forum is growing pretty fast. It is new but has a lot of activity daily. I'm using phpBB. What kind of problems exactly are you talking about that you can have using phpBB with a large, active forum?

I like the monetizing ideas like selling Stickies. Have to keep that one in mind for later.

 

You can hire people right here on DP that have interest in your forum. What i did was, i build the forum, got some members, and then i noticed that there were a few members that were very active around the forum, so i send them a message and told them if they were interested in being part of the staff

Thanks.

 

If your fine with phpbb, that is great. This happens to alot of forum owners, when their forum gets bigger.. they tend to install mods that will interest their members, such as Arcade mods, etc, which are not available on the free boards, but are available in IPB or VB. That is just one example, there are many other reasons that affect it. But, if your fine with the features you currently have with phpbb and it wont bother you when your forum gets bigger then you are fine.

 

Updates:

I thought i would add a few more points into the guide.

Why would a member stay at your site and not the rest?

Well, think as a member, if you came to your forum, do you want to be redirected, popups and show ads all the time? No, i know i wont stay at that forum. What i did in the beginning of the year was that i had absolutely no kinds of ads, and members really liked it. You should make a place for members to stay and get used to first. Try to keep your forum as clean as possible, with good amount of topics and post in each sections for the members to read or browse.

 

As far as I understand from vbulletin.org the adsense revenue sharing mod that you are talking about doesnt work with vb 3.7.x so this information is incorrect.

Keyconcept provides a vbulletin 3.7.x adsense revenue sharing mod that works. Don't install the revenue sharing mod if you believe it will bring you more visitors or members, because it will not. Most people don't even know what adsense is.

Forum contests are also overrated as 200 dollars seems not enough to trigger people to register and join a simple contest. But a contest is better than no contest at all.

Paying members to post is also a tactic that is not working a lot. I've seen forums with paid posts and these posts are redicoulous. Never I would like to have those stupid kind of posts in my forum.

So.. to attract visitors to your forum you need to post everyday for example 10 new threads with an interesting article.

Make sure rss is activated and that SE's can find these feeds. It will bring you a lot of visitors as soon SE's picked up your feeds.

Comment on blog posts within the niche of your forum and invite the bloggers to your forum. This tactic brings me the most members that post in the forum. They love the sig link feature.

Get some strong backlinks. Don't go for hundreds of worthless BL's, just 3 or 4 strong high PR links is enough to get the ball rolling.

Don't spend to much time looking what your competition is doing or where your pages are in serps.. Just focus on content and those visitors will come after a while. It can take months, but when they arrive, they will never leave anymore.

My 2 ct's

 

You have some good points there, but as i never used VB before i have no idea about how their mods work.

 

Thats a nice post Proximity!
Can you please let us know what you did with your forum at its initial stage (with 0 members/0 posts)?

 

I recently started my first forum and get a few visitors but rarely does anybody make a post. I really need to start making more posts myself but it's just that people are sure to notice I'm the only person posting and getting no responses.

I went with vbulletin. I like the way people can upload video's now. It's a fact though that folks don't want to post to a dead forum. They usually post hoping for feedback on a question or want to look around to find some useful information.

When you don't have either for them it's adios time. I really thought I had a nice niche but maybe it's just too nichy and not enough people are interested.

Thanks for the ideas though.

 

i heard many people saying adsens s not working well with forum
but i think it workz great with forum
my forum isn ot that old
its 7 or 8 months old and its going decent on adsens
atleast better then u

and as for forum script my fav is SMF
i hav tried all but found SMF better then all..

 

At the initial stage, i was just posting as i had interest in the site and the niche. Then i went on and told my friends and basically it was the word of mouth of how the new members came. After that i submitted my sites to a few directories, and also bought advertising on some of my related niche sites. What you can do is also allow guests to see your topic and posts so Google will be able to index your site and give you some targetted traffic, but this is only useful if your updating your forum always (Which i prefer)

No niche is too saturated if you do right marketing with it. Follow the what i wrote above to johnchow and i hope you get some ideas.

Adsense can work fine on forums if you place it right. People say it doesnt work on forums because forums usually get the same people everyday, and they are well aware of the ads, and just ignore them...where as sites get new unique visitors everday, which gives them some advantage of making more money with adsense.

Thanks.

 

Your guide is very good, thank you!

 

Thanks for your positive response

More updates will be on the way!

 

Thanks for the info... i've just relaunched my forum - gone from about 650 users to 30ish, but it's opened my eyes to boosting my forum again (i had too much help last time i didn't realise what was going on).

Any suggestions on how/where to sell banners?

 

If its the site in your signature, it has potential. You mean where to buy advertising for your forum? OR you want to sell advertisements on your site?

Well, you can search the net and fine sites that are similar to yours and put your banner on their site/forum to get yourself some traffic. You can submit to directories, and also post on forums that are the same niche as yours.

I think you need to boost your traffic and database and then you can think about selling banners on your site.

 

Great read. Recommended for every newbies.

 

Thanks for the awesome tips . I guess all it takes is some long term commitment and hard work to make it big

 

Thanks Proximity,

Good read. Giving me the ambition to attempt another stab at resurrecting my forum. I have another website right now that's pretty hot getting 1,500 unique visitors per day. I'm sure if I moved my Vbulletin forum over there it would start getting posts pretty quick. I just started collecting email addresses for a mailing list on that site and signed up 1200 people in a week.

I'm trying to decide if I should switch the forum over to my new site, make another forum and leave the other one be, or just blowing off the forum on the new site because I've learned what a pain it is to get a forum going lol.

If it's as difficult to make Adsense cash in forums as everybody says, i'm thinking forget it. But as someone else stated Adsense placement and presentation is a major factor in Adsense success.

I have 2 sites about a very similar subject, one being the one I just mentioned. The other site is getting about half or a little less traffic than half of the site that's getting 1,500 visitors. It doesn't make nearly half of the Adsense revenue though. It's all about Ad placement and presentation. The site that gets 1,500 visitors gets around 12+% CTR and the other site is lucky to get 2.5% ctr. BIG difference.

Keywords do matter though. So having zero to little control of what is being typed into each page will definitely affect adsense revenue. Just not sure if I want to get my feet wet again. It could be a good additional source of revenue if implemented properly but is it worth all the extra work?

Peace,

Herman

 

I am glad my post helped you out. I hope your projects go successful.

Good luck.

 

Me too, very useful information for forum starters.