How Do I Start A Forum?

hey everyone just wondering how do i start a forum? like dp, vwvortex, piranha-fury.com, etc.. where would i register it and who would host it? newb here so just need some help thanks

 

Its kinda hard to start a forum like DP. You would start out by paying thousands to get some traffic but anyways to start up a forum theres:

Paid Forums
http://www.vbulletin.com/
http://www.invisionpower.com/

Free forums
http://invisionfree.com/
http://www.phpbb.com/
http://www.simplemachines.org/

You can pick a host in the host section of DP. There are plenty out there

 

First, buy yourself a good domain, from sites like Godaddy, Dynadot, namecheap, register.com, name.com.

Second, sign up for a reliable hosting provider. You can many good deals here itself in this forum.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=98

Third, link your account. I mean, set the domain name's nameservers --> web hosting account.

Fourth, go to CPanel and add a forum like say PHPbb, SMF, etc. If you can't find the forum, you'll need to download, upload to the web server and install manually.

Digital Point Forums use the VBullentin forums, which is not free. If you want it, buy a license.

That's it.

 

whoa thanks for the quick response! really helpful thanks!

 

If you read more on DP in different forums you can learn alot
Best of luck

 

another thing, i would like to start a forum for personal enjoyment but do forums make money and how do forums make money? from adsense? thanks

 

Forums can make money in many ways, ads, subscribers/subscriptions, secret methods of peoples minds.

 

One can put adsense ads in side areas of a forum. Popular forums like this one (for example) can make a lots of $$$, this way. It's said, the owner of this forum (Shawn) makes 10K per month!

 

subscriptions make money? how is that?

 

well people would pay to see private forums where only subscribers or VIP's can see...

 

They have to get something from it, something special that would meet their wants

 

setting up the forum is the easy bit (you could just use Joomla with Fireboard for a free option), the hard bit is getting the users to it!

 

Start with TRAFFIC first. Assemble an email list or social network cluster where you share info and communications amongst members. Once you have this critical mass, migrating your "installed base" to a forum would be much easier.

From what I've seen, there's a big secret re successful forums: most are "made popular" and/or "made busy" by a small core group of "friends." My advice: build this core group first then migrate them to your forum.

 

thats a very good point. Trying to start a forum from scratch is almost impossible (unless u have lots of ad money to throw at it) because it's a chicken and an egg situation, people will use the forum if people are there, but to get people there you have to get people to use the forum!

Start off with groups in FaceBook or Myspace and do as the guy says above.