What are the important lessons you learn starting your fourm?

Hi,
Would you please share with us
what are the important lessons you learn starting your fourm?

 

The biggest mistake I made with a previous forum was not having a "business plan" for it...I just created the forums and didn't know where I wanted to go with them....6 months later, it still wasn't clear where they were going and I still didn't know.

Sit down and create a plan of some sort and a rough outline to follow, dont just fly by the seat of your pants

Second...running a forum is not easy and it will take a lot of time and a long time, so don't get discouaraged quickly.

 

Forums take time and effort. You have to post, and post, and post. month after month after month. They build slowly. I think most people give up too soon (i.e. after 2-3 months).

I just left a successful forum after 5 years. I've been running a second similiar forum since the first of the year. At first there was nobody. Then 2-3 users online. then 3-5. Now it's 5-9 users online throughout the day. But that took 4 months; during which time I was a fairly lonely poster posting the best niche info I could. However! the traffic is trending exactly the way my last forum did, so I expect in a year or two it'll be busy, and in 3+ years it'll be very busy. It's in the financial sector, so it'll be worth some money too.

But I post there all the time.....week after week, month after month as lots of people read and few respond just yet. Most of my competitors gave up before now and left behind spam filled carcasses. Not me - post post post!

 

I learnt that it is the tough most project to undertake if you are not expert and have less time to add threads and posts (mulitple accounts).

 

I have an opportuniy to make a good offline campaign in my country. And offering some gift, I expect to get 1000 registration within 3 months.

Do you think it is fair enough to start a forum?

 

If you are certain you can get 1,000 members in 3 months, yes, that is phenomenal growth for a new forum. I'd be interested to hear what your campaign is about though...have you ever built any forums? It's much harder than most people think, and 1,000 members in the first 3 months is something that 99% of forums will never see.

 

apart from the setup the big mistake I made was making the forum login driven, so in order to see the posts you had to be logged in, that also prevented the spiders from seeing the content and of course meant less exposure to the search engines.

 

I don't know if I could say I made any mistakes, really, unless my mistake was the fact that all my friends had dried up by the time I created a forum of my own.

 

I learned that there's no substitute for being unique (or at least targeting a non-saturated market), and that concentrating on enforcing the quality of posts can eventually get you the quantity via word of mouth. I also learned that long posts on a variety of subjects create a sort of momentum as search engines index the content to bring in more people.

 

well said my friend

 

Absolutely.

 

I am trying to get a new forum off the ground. Anyone want to exchange posts? say (20 for 20 or something?)

 

I jumped into a solid niche (bodybuilding) with a GREAT team of members backing me since day 1.

I started it with 40-50 registered users, about 20 were active every day. I've gotten 2,100 members in a year and 3 months and "active" visitors are in the 400-500 a week (140-200 members active each day, but varied days when people login and I can tell this by statistics). It didn't take much time to get the ball rolling due to some politics on the biggest site for my niche on the 'net. A lot of quality users of their forum left for my site due to some reasons of them closing a long-time thread with about 50 active posters. I took advantage, and they came to my site.

My best advice, have many friends in your niche before you start your site up or if the site's already started personally invite people. Don't rely on SERPS/SEO to bring a "new" site to the top, a personal invite to a site goes further than a link on Google I believe.