One of the hardest websites to start is a forum

Sounds like a plan. Is that for seo purposes?

 

I agree with you, it is one of the hardest to start and get going. If you are not careful, it could be a money pit. The only way to get a good forum going is by investing money in hiring forum posters, advertising, and any possible promotions you can do. If you dedicate a lot of time and a good budget and you are wait it out, you can be successful. However, most forums fail because the owner either does not invest enough time and money or they get discouraged and just gives up.

I have had a very successful forum and sold it (the new owner closed it a year later because he did not keep up with it) and I have had two that failed. It takes way too much time for me and I can make more money doing blogs and other types of sites. That is me, if you have it in you many forum owners make lots of money.

Good luck!

 

For forums, the real problem is to get active members

 

I'm a staff of a paid forum service. You should try our service because we already have lots of satisfied customers. If you like it then I will send the link to you by pm.

 

Forums are really tough to start off especially in a competitive niche. I'm in the process of starting a new one, that is in my signature.

A few tips to starting a forum:

• Make sure when you start off you don't have a ton of different categories, keep it to a minimum 8-10 worked good for me.
• Before you even consider advertising your forum start posting in it, the more the better. People will not join if you don't have the content.
• I have found post exchanges in the beginning really help a forum take off, plus they don't cost any money.
• Don't plaster your site with ads, after you start getting numerous regular visitors you can add them slowly.
• I've found that posting in related forums with a link in the signature to be really helpful also.

 

Read this and then ask yourself, why you want to start a forum. If you still think you should have started the forum, then it will succeed one day.

 

You are probably right, but you will still notice that digitalpoint username here on DP (Shawn) still is at the top of the list with post count. I'm sure he posted probably more than anyone else to ensure that questions were answered and in return people felt like the forum was useful and stuck around.

There is nothing worse than a forum that people go to, post a question about something and never recieve a response. In fact, it is probably the easiest way to lose your traffic.

 

I dont know what you consider a successful forum, but I started a forum and it gets about 4000-6000 visits from google alone per month.

My forum is very niche related. I started it over 3 months ago, but the domain was registered a bit over 8 months ago. Its not one year old yet even, but the forum is PR 1 now.

I would suggest making forums that are niche related, and that are specifically about one general topic or theme.

 

PR1?? That's pretty bad. But your visitors sound good if they're unique.

 

I run a semi popular forum, (nothing like this forum, but it has about 200 people on at all hours) and what you need to do is make seo mods on it so that the search engines pic up the posts better for keywords, then you just need to start posting like crazy with usefull information....It will take a little time but its worth it down the line.
If you look at this forum Shawns (the owner) has almost 20,000 posts. And Im sure most were made in the begining. ( I just looked at his profile here, he has -2 itraders...haha)

So in short post great stuff that people will wanna read and they will find it..

 

if you need help let me know I can connect you " with a cheap form designer"

 

The forum got PR 1 in only 3 months. I get 99% of my traffic from Google. With about 80-90% new visitors per day. And daily sign ups.

I think thats not too bad?