Hello everyone, I am going to start a new community site based around a particular hobby of mine. What I really want to do is start a forum, but I have tried to do this before and actually getting people to post and interact is not as easy as it sounds. Basically,I was thinking of starting a blog to post a few articles and from there,move the discussion and comment posting on to the forum. I have had good experiences generating traffic with blogs before so I think this is my best shot at getting initial traffic coming in from the search engines. Eventually, I would simply stop posting to the blog and move everything over to the forum definitely, once I get the forum indexed and some nice SE traffic. This is where I started to come up with a couple of doubts: 1) Is this a good idea to get initial traffic and potential forum members? 2)Directory structure. How should I do it? Keep in mind that if I host the blog in the root of my domain I will eventually stop posting. The ideal thing would be to have my forum in the root. Maybe blog.example.com for the blog and forum in the root of the domain? Or example.com/blog and example.com/forum? Host the blog in the root of the domain and then 301 all the content to example.com/blog and move my forum to the root? Any ideas and tips you could give me are greatly appreciated. I have only tried starting a community forum once before and failed hard,but that was ages ago. Thank you!
I would have the forum on the root of your domain and the blog on a subdomain. But that's only my opinion. You also should look at getting backlinks via signatures in forums, submitting to directories ad doing any sort of promotion you can. Also look at paid posting options to get content on your forum to start with. There are lots of people who offer these services at quite good prices and its great to build up content early on.
Thanks smallone! I've been thinking about going with the blog on a subomain or on example.com/blog If I build links to example.com/blog , even if it is on a subfolder, it should "raise" the entire domain? I've read that SEs tend to treat subdomains as separate domains.
Why don't you just post some interesting content in the forum itself. No need of blog, just post in the forum. Get a few friends or pay someone that is interested in that hobby to write a lot in the beginning. Use PPC (AdWords is a good choice) when you have a good amount of interested articles, etc. to bring new members. Sponsored reviews on niche blogs are a good idea to drive targeted traffic for cheap.
kickstarting a forum is one of THE most difficult thing to do unless you have some topic which attracts peoplenaturally like porn or warez, it will be hard to push it. No one wants to post in a blank forum. If your topic is a dull topic than may be you are better with a blog. Pushkar
try to get all your friends to post comments so the forum looks lively, than that will get people to join when you promote it
It's really tough to start a forum. I know because I failed once miserably. You have to post yourself a lot and to find interested people. Start with your friends and people having the same hobbies. I don't see paying someone as a good solution because you need good content to attract people and usually payed content is low quality. I don't know is I'm the right person to give you advices, I already failed once .
Get as many friends and relatives as you can get to sign-up... you may be able to drive traffic to your forum but who would want to be a part of the forum with almost no members and no activity. Post a lot and ask your friends to contribute as well every single day.
Thanks everyone for your input. Since this is going to be a forum in spanish it's hard to find some paid to post services. I'm gonna stick with the blog idea and report back on how it does. I can generate some traffic to blogs pretty quick. If I can get a couple of interesting (or even controversial) articles in the blog and move the discussion to the forum I might be able to get some members.
I don't think you should give up on your plans to start a community forum. There are ways to get people to start posting, you may want to look for it through Google search.
Interesting thread title. I'm in the process of building my site and including a forum. I opted for Joomla. but now I'm having second thoughts reading about all the problems associated with getting a forum going.
I have a forum with 18,000+ members, I really should write an ebook about everything from the last two years. I will give you 1 pointer. I spring boarded the forum, using youtube videos