How Much Money Would I Need To Start A Succesful Forum?

Hi,

I've got a forum running PHPbb 3 and I have a domain name. Just wondered how much money I would need to get this advertised and make it into a decent forum, i.e hiring forum posters etc.

Thoughts appreciated

 

Depends on how quickly you want it to expand. I think you could make a decent start with $250 per month.

 

Wasn't hoping for that high!

 

As Bannaz said, it really depends how quickly you want the forum to get going. If you can't really do SEO etc yourself, then you'll have to pay someone to do it, and also forum posters will have to give your forum a helping hand at the start. Another good solution is to pay people to post in forums similar to yours with your forum URL in their signature.

I'm not sure how much it costs for an SEO'er, but if you pay $50 that'll get you 500 forum posts, and then an extra $20 for 200 posts in other forums. Really depends how many sections your forum has???

 

Ask DP owner shawn.

 

After looking over the internet I found that a new forum should stick to under 10 categories, so I thnk I'm going to end up with around 7.

$50 for 500 forum posts doesn't sound bad at all thanks!

As for asking shawn, well, thats not going to happen

 

Make sure when you get the forum posts you:
1) find different people to do it. Get 20 people to post 20 posts each or something. This will give you a nice spread
2) Put people on a 3 post trial before they start. This will ensure you can moderate who is posting and you can get high quality posts instead of 'yehh i agree' style posts...
3) Set a minimum word count, usually around 20 words per post.
4) Make sure they don't post all the posts on one day. Limit it to 5 or so posts per day.

 

What do you think would be a reasonable amount to give per post?

 

Well, the standard rate is $0.10 per post, and this will get you a good response, but like I said, you should make sure you get people to do 3-5 trial posts to check you are getting quality. If you want really high quality posts then I would advise paying $0.15 to $0.20 per post, athough $0.10 per post will suffice.

 

You need at least $100 for the ads purpose.
Need to cover the part
-forum poster
-reward for forum member recruit new member to the forum
-adword
-fast and reliable server cost
-etc

 

I have only had a couple of unsuccessful attempts at a forum,
So I can't offer much advice
I do think it's a complete waste of time to advertise a dead or empty forum though.

However you do it, I think it needs to appear a bit active and have some interesting threads before you even begin to advertise it.
What's the point of spending money to attract people to your site if they are just going to leave as soon as they get there?

There is also post swapping to consider rather than just purely paying people to post.

I also think it's more of a hard work and effort thing rather than a budget one.
(I don't think it will be a success just by throwing money at it)
I found The Admin Zone To be a great place to go for help when I was trying to get a forum going.

The most important thing though:
Make sure it's a niche that you have a strong personal interest in!

Just my 2 cents

 

Force all your friends, relatives, neighbours and dogs to join and post heavily in your forum. This can save you some money on forum posting. BTW I won't recommend you to use paid forum posting because once paid posters will be gone the forum will look like a lonely place.

 

The idea is that all of the forum posts will make it look lively, and then people will come to the forum while the paid posters are midway through their job, so they overlap, and the non paid posters stay, and keep overlapping with new visitors.

Also, a good tactic is to hire a lot of people at different times. For instance, get person A, B and C to post 5 times per day each for 1 week, then pay person C, D and E to post the second week. This is just an example, but you get the idea. Make sure there is some kind of overlap, though

 

I will suggest you to concentrate on marketing of your forum yourself and try to attract webmaster for your forum by offering something in return for certain post counts rather then in terms of cash may be domain name or hosting space if you can afford that.

 

Try holding some contests, too. Offer cash prizes and vouchers to people who have the highest post count etc. This will encourage people to post in your forum because they want the money! I personally would advise doing a contest every month for around $50, and whoever made the most valuable posts in that month wins the $50. Make sure people are excluded from the competition for spamming, though.

 

This is will not be right way to promote forum ! ppl will not post valuable message as DP receives,resultant spam will increase and forum will be down.

In my opinion think before creating forum, try creating forum that is unique and SEO it out and that will generally work for you.
Try creating a forum on topic you like.

 

You can start off with very little money, I would hire forum posters and advertisers. I wouldn't recommend adwords just yet it's a lot of money and people will not stay at register if it looks empty. You can do cheap fun contests, I do these all the time and members love them even though the prizes aren't even expensive.

 

Some brilliant ideas here guys, I'll try a few out

Maybe this page could be a sticky for how to start a forum!

 

Hmm, I'm not so sure, I've seen forums who run contests and it's not just the amount of posts that the forum gets, but the quality, too. If you think about it, no one wants to get disqualified for short or useless posts, so they try to keep their posts really imformative.

I definately agree with both of these two points. Ranking highly in search engines is absolutely crucial for any forum. People will type in the niche of the forum (for instance Internet Marketing), and you need to be practically shoving your forum all over their screen. Don't let them pass through Google without seeing your site!

Creating a forum on a topic you like is very important, especially if you want to be an active member yourself, purely because you will have a better understanding of the subject and will be able to pick out the good posts from the bad ones.

Another thing you have to think about is Moderation. For the first months it could be pretty tough, and I would expect unless you pay someone you'll have to do all the Admin/Moderation work yourself. However, when the forum has more active members, you should hold unpaid vacancies for moderator roles. People who are active on the forum will want to help you out with this because they clearly like the forum and want to keep it tidy and running smoothly.

Anyway, hope this has helped!

 

I totally agree with kiteguy. Start a contest.