Starting a forum?

[BillEssley]

I'm going to start a forum about making money online or wordpress (guides, web hosting). Any advice on where should I start?
What are the best ways to promote it and getting members to join?

 

[Ron Killian]

Sorry to say, a forum is the last thing I'd ever start.

SO much work and time involved. Promotion, getting members and quality ones at that, keeping members, keeping out spam, weed out junk posts. Just getting regulars to keep coming back.

Think real hard about it before you spend to much time on it.

 

[ulterios]

Just as Ron stated above, there is so much work and other things involved with starting a forum. Make sure that you are ready to be committed to it and to the time requirements to make it a success.

If you really do want to start one and are ready to do what it takes, make sure that you have enough of a following to get your initial membership up and going. It would be best to have as many people who interact with you in whatever niche you choose before starting one. It help to be known, either by your name or ID/etc. from around the web.

Don't go into it blind with not much resources as far as ability to get GOOD and ACTIVE members. A forum will be made or lost by the amount of activity it has on it's boards.

 

[SEOPub]

No offense, but if you are thinking about starting a forum about making money online and you are asking how you should go about promoting it and getting members, maybe you should rethink this idea.

 

[KatnissEverdeen]

My fiancée and I started a forum awhile ago. It started off well. Traffic has trailed off though due to both of us focusing on another project. When we were fully focused on it and advertising, we did forum and blog posting/promotion and used different social media networks to drive traffic to our site. As well as trying to frequently posting quality content to keep our members engaged. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

 

[Developer]

My advice would be to start with a blog. This will enable you to put whatever content you want out there for the public to view. THEN, and only then, once your blog has a large enough of a following...

... THEN, re-visit the idea of a forum. If you're blog visitors are loyal to you and your blog, you could even post a "poll" to see how many of your readers would be interested in you setting up a forum. (and even then, just because 300 "john's and sally's" SAY they would be interested in you having a forum, doesn't really mean they will have the want/desire and/or time, to be an active participant)

Who knows, even if your blog does become a big hit, you may then decide you don't want a forum after-all since you COULD get similar results with a blog (comments for those wanting to comment on one of your posts and "guest posts" if you want further interaction with your readers/followers).

I would NEVER say DON'T DO IT, however, as a few have pointed out already, running a forum can sometimes be MUCH more work than an 80 hour work week (aka J.O.B.) You really DO have to be committed when running a forum. I won't go into all the negatives, but do know there are many many many factors to consider.

Just my 2¢. HTH.

 

[Hawker]

Better to start a blog first and then get the readers/subscribers. Then when your blog is successful and you are churning out some amazing content pieces that people actually find useful. Think about expanding that blog to a forum as well.

That way you've already got the reader base there in which you can tell them about your new forum.

Starting a forum from scratch in any niche is never going to be an easy task. Not impossible of course but not easy either.

First you have to think about what foruming software you want to use and you either go with one of the free ones like myphp or phpbb or something in which case you are pretty limited in what you can do and have to wait for them to release bug fixes / patches etc if any at all.

Where as if you go with the paid option you will have much more options available to you but that can be quite expensive and without knowing if your forum is going to be successful or not it could mean pouring money down the drain.

That said, its not to say you shouldn't go with either. Some people go with the free option at first, work hard at building the forum up with users/posts etc etc and then later make the move to a paid forum like Xenforo, VB etc. But that can be tricky and technical and expensive too! The drawback with going with a free forum software is that generally, the paid ones have much more features and people seem to like that today.

It all comes down to research. Finding a niche that is in high demand and finding out what most of those people searching it are looking for. Then there's the setting up part, you will need hosting, need security, need mods to moderate it. The list goes on and on.

Plus the make money online niche is super super saturated today! There are already many make money online forums out there. You need to ask yourself, what will your forum offer people that the other forums don't already? And why should people post to your forum with 5 members when they can post to other forums that have 500,000 members?

Just some food for thought for you.