Good tips.. I wanted to either redirect my blogspot blog to a domain hosted by Godaddy (which i am going to buy).. I have hard time choosing from forum or blog.. or both.. But godaddy's hosting service is limited. Its also hard to start generating traffic in forums.
Getting a forum off the ground is hard work. I hate that so many people use the method of making many new accounts, and then they talk to themselves, to get people going. I'm not for that method, even though I understand the reasoning behind it. Best advice I can give is find something niche, or do something different, to keep, generate, and retain traffic. Even then, only a small number of your base will actually post.
Good tips, but unfortunately, one of my forums is still failing - even after trying for so many years.
Yeah, not straight away, but having a good base of posts AND members, AND ogranic traffic, then is the best time for competitions and stuff.
One little thing i always do, is make each and every single of my forums unique usually by the theme/skin. People see the same skin bought from a company over and over again, no one will be interested in a professional/internet-savvy group they will think its "pathetic", so i always make sure my skin is different in more than 4-5 ways. Also its true that advertising can be best with 468x60 banners, word of mouth, and backlinks are like #1 (someone else said this too ;D), make sure you get on google!
I disagree with the first tip. I think a splash page or, putting the board on maintenance with an opening soon message would be much better.
I plan to make a forum in the semi-near future and my plan is to start off with a single forum category for general posting. Then as more members come, I can start adding new categories for specific discussion. Because if someone comes to a big empty forum with 20 different forum sections (sports, movies, music, questions and suggestions, etc.) they're going to feel overwhelmed. Of course, I haven't tested it yet. It's just speculation.
The idea behind launching a forum on a particular niche is to inform the members about the latest happenings and solve the problems; casual questions like "how old are you?" may be in general section whereas niche and business related questions and answers make the backbone of the forum.