Starting and Managing an Internet Forum

The Internet, since its inception, has always been about communication. Early in the Internet's history, forums were set up as a way for people to come together and talk all in a central place. Since then, forums have evolved into advanced online applications that people use everyday. There are thousands of them online, ranging from nearly empty to hosting a plethora of posts and users every day. The administrators of those large forums are quite fortunate, for they have certainly made a great fortune off their user base (they would have to in order to pay for hosting). If you want to be like that, then be prepared, because there is a lot of work ahead of you.

Forums are no doubt one of the hardest types of websites to get off the ground. As stated, there are a multitude out there, so you have a lot of competition. Another thing about forums is that people are rarely active in more than a few, and once they get established in a couple good ones, they are not going to leave for a long time. Competition in the forum world is much different than in a regular business. It is much easier to steal a long time customer off one business (say, because you have a better deal) than to steal an established member of a forum. This is because forum users are active and even emotionally attached in their community, so you can forget about trying to convert these people.

Another problem with starting a forum is that, obviously, it starts off empty. With lots of large forums out there, why would anybody want to join an empty one? There are several ways to combat this problem. One is just to market and SEO the forum as you would any other site, and hope that people start posting naturally. Honestly, however, this is not a good approach to take. If you want to be successful, you have to be ready to shell out a lot of money for paid forum posters. These posters help get your site started by making hundreds of preliminary posts, so organic users will feel like the site is active when they visit. However, this is very expensive, and prices can go as high as $35 per post. To find cheaper labor, go directly to the source and hire freelance posters, who work for ten or fifteen cents per post. A handy way to get free posts is to ask your friends to sign up, although do not expect much if you are not giving anything in return (but if you can get ten free posts out of them, you might as well try).

The type of forum you have also has a heavy effect on whether or not you will be successful. There are lots of different forum systems available, such as phpBB, vBulletin, and Invision Power Board. vBulletin is considered the best forum system, although it is not free. Besides the system, the topic the forum focuses on is also incredibly important. There are already a ton of general and pop culture forums out there, so you can forget about having one of those (although a small section of your forum could relate to that). Instead, start a forum about a specific topic and focus heavily on that. Unless you have literally thousands of dollars, this is your only hope of being a successful forum webmaster.

Starting a forum-only site is incredibly difficult, but something that facilitates the process is having a content website to back it up. For example, you could have a site about business and marketing, and on your website have lots of articles regarding the subject. Then, as a subdomain or just page on your website, you could have a forum. If your website was www.businessandmarketing.com, the forum could be forum.businessandmarketing.com or businessandmarketing.com/forum. By having a content-rich website to back up your forum, the chances of success are increased heavily.

The final goal of starting a forum is to have an active community with lots of members. Early on, you were probably thinking of how to monetize these members, and it is not as easy as you think. It is unwise to put pop-ups on since those will scare people away, and PPC programs like AdSense have very low CTRs on forums. CPM banners and similar things have the same effect as pop-up ads, although they are a level above them. The best things you can do are sell advertising and promote an affiliate program related to your topic. If your forum is large, it will be easy to sell advertising, and affiliate programs have relatively high conversion rates when they are placed on related forums. It is important to do a lot of research into the product you will be promoting, so you can find the one that relates to your topic the best.

I have said it before and I will say it again; running a forum is very hard work. It takes a lot of money, determination, and most importantly, patience, to make a forum work. This level of patience is unparalleled to any other website, as it can take years for your forum to finally become active. It is easy to give up after six months, and you may see that you need to (running a forum is not for everyone), but if your dream is to run a great forum, just keep working and eventually it will turn out to be successful.