Before social networks got all famous and people started expressing themselves in less than 140 characters using Twitter, where did people network and discuss?
What happened when you had a question you wanted to ask, it didn’t go as a LinkedIn question or Facebook status message, people logged on to a message board or forums and got their problems solved by experts or other people that have previously experienced the same issue.
The big question that gets effortlessly thrown around, is that are forums still relevant? Yes they are, one can’t get a .htaccess problem resolved in 140 characters and you surely can’t discuss about spare parts for your old truck. This is where forums come to the rescue, these vibrant communities consist of experienced members who make new comers feel welcome and guide them around the forum.
If you have a new forum or planning to start a new forum you should consider the following 10 Tips that will give you a better chance of making it big:
1. Run a referral contest and let bloggers in your niche know about your forum. Referral contests are a great way to get bloggers talking about your forum because they stand to get paid if they win the contest. (Make sure you keep multiple prizes)
2. Buy banner advertisements from blogs and forums in your niche. Adwords is not a bad choice either if you have a decent budget. You should use both these methods if your in for branding.
3. Introduction, use introduction forum to promote other interesting threads on the forum. Newcomers should get a warm welcome on your forum.
4. Contests, more contests: Run more contests and reward members for simple things such as; highest poster of the week/month, most contributing member, thread of the month (thread with maximum views / replies) and etc.
5. Start new threads on your own. Most forum members are mostly interested in posting responses to threads they like, you and your moderators have to create new interesting threads to keep your members engaged. Give them something to post a few every time they visit your forum. Follow latest trends in your niche and create topics around them.
6. Use polls so that your members get to know more about each other. This will give fuel to your forum’s engines and your members will know what kind of threads are liked in forum.
7. For certain niches, it might make sense to share Adsense revenues with forum members.
8. Usual methods like posting excellent content on other forums and blogs to draw visitors tend to have mixed results.
9. Keep a tab on spam posts, everyone gets turned off when they see number of irrelevant threads on a forum. You want to retain your visitors once they have signed up.
10. Award your members by allowing them to have a DoFollow signature and latest blog entry. This can be a double edged sword and might get some SPAM on your forum, but it’s worth a try.
By implementing these simple methods on your forum, you will be on your way to create a successful forum.
14 Discussions
I agree with many of your points above, always make sure you love your community and staff members, thoese are the people who help keep your board a success!
I think these points can be used on blogs aswell, well some of them anyways.
This is really helpful too because just in the nick of times, I’m starting to try out forum management too.. I’ve bookmarked this article for future reference
Btw Alex and Janith, let me be the first (hopefully) to say that this whole guest posting has been a great thing for you guys to do, both others on this blog and you guys on other blogs!
Keep up the great work!
SERPGenius
@SERPGenius: I am glad the tips will be useful for you. I agree that some of these tips can also be used for blog, nothing like getting a quick respsonse to a comment I made
Many bloggers have run contests successfully to amass a lot of backlinks / RSS subscribers, that should be covered in another post
I have always found it very, very difficult to get a forum off the ground. Having some tips like these will sure come in handy for anyone looking to startup a forum, or if they’re trying to increase their members.
Nice post there Jeet!
Thank you for guest posting here at Blogussion.
We appreciate your contribution and you are included in much appraised body of contributors =P
We’ll be sending your post-ideas in the near future and hopefully you can continue to write for our readers.
Janith
Feedburner has gone mad and shows 0 happy subscribers for you. Either your subscribers are unhappy or they have gone away after reading my post.
If you already have post-ideas it will be even easier to write a post
@ Jeet – FeedBurner should pick up their act! The subscribers have been down for more than 24 hours! I’m sure your post wasn’t that bad! haha, nah it’s a problem they are “looking into”…
Hopefully they can fix it soon!
I just checked. You have to login to your feedburner account and move it to google. May it another blog entry in the making
A lot of bloggers will benefit if you put the steps in a blog post.
Hey Jeet,
Yeah Alex just told me this ~ an article about it won’t be such a bad idea after all!
Thanks for the useful tips. Also, new forum owner can also hire a few people to post on the new forum.
Nowadays, forums prop up on basically all subjects. I have seen general themed forums, such as the SEO Forum to specific subject forums, such as gardening in Wyoming. But it all boils down to one situation… all niches have their own popular forums with loyal members. Starting a forum from scratch and generating new sign ups is one of the most difficult activities online.
Contests do help, but up to the point of the draw date. After all is said and done and the dust settles, it is back to the same old scenario…few members making the bulk of the discussions.
I have planned a forum and yet to officially launch it and this post will serve as a strong motivator on my quest to build it from bottom up.
Hi, cool site, good writing
Nice post. Forums are hard for beginners because they are very hard to start up. There are some good tips to get the forum started here. Contests are one of the best ways.
teenwebguru’s last blog post..10 Ways to Improve Writing
When starting a forum the most important thing is to ‘know’ that forum won’t take off before a year is gone.
Jeet’s last blog post..Are you tired of looking for dofollow blogs?
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