Everyone is talking about that’s right one of the hottest online and the power of having a online forum community like ambatchmasterpublisher. Recently studies have show that 7 out of 10 people online today have already signed up and active in at least one forums. Many people through these communities continue to build friends, network, and telling others about the community they are involved in similar to ambatchmasterpublisher.
So you have had an idea of building a onlin community, but your looking of a place to start. Well, we are here to share with you 4 simple tips on how to build a long lasting community.
1. Establish Your Niche Topic for the Community.
I have seen a lot of forums try to cover to much or just about everything in their community. While it’s a good idea to have a “Chit Chat” or “Lounge” area of your forum to give members an opportunity to talk about anything. However, the success of your forum is to have a specific niche topic that will not only get your forum indexed by the search engines, but something that will attract your core audience.
This is one of the biggest obstacles to overcome even though it may seem the easiest thing to understand. Many novice forum webmasters see that they can add as many categories and sub-forums as they can in their overall website forum, and the main topic gets lost. In turn, when a visitor does happen to come the website, they are turned off by a ‘General’ forum.
2. Select the best Web Community Script
There are so many community and forum scripts out there in which this is another huge major obstacle a novice webmaster comes across.
Now there is nothing wrong with this, but sometimes these forums scripts are so modified and ‘hacked’ as is sometimes referred to modified forum scripts that it will be hard for you to create one just like your favorite forum. Sometimes thinking outside the forum box by thinking of putting together a customized wordpress or drupal can build a great community as well.
I would suggest to start off with a free forum script that has the feature to ‘migrate’ forum information to another forum script. For example. Start off with the free forum script phpBB. This is by far the most powerful free script available. Even most web hosts have it part of their package that you can install on a single click (we’ll talk more about web hosts later).
So for example, you website is successful and you wish to ‘change your forum foundation script’ to a ‘paid script’ such as vBulletin. vBulletin has a migration tool for phpBB, the process would be seamless and you wouldn’t lose any forum information.
The worst thing for a forum community is to have a lot of activity on the forum and then the webmaster decided to change the forum platform because the free one they started out with just doesn’t have all the features of other forum communities. So the webmaster changes the forum script and loses the forum information. I guarantee this will KILL your community.
So starting off with a wise plan in the beginning to grow is a huge step.
3. Selecting Your Web Host
The next thing after selecting what forum platform you wish to use, is the painfully hard decision of finding the right web host.
I URGE you DO NOT start a community off in any free hosting or free community. Please stay away from free forum web hosts! Let’s just leave it at that.
Either way, you’ll be spending a few bucks a month on web hosting, but as you build your community you can slowly introduce your own Google Adsense or Banner Ad campaigns that will make you enough money to cover your web hosting costs and in many cases, enough to pay for your gas that month and more even more!
Select a web host within your budget, and make sure that the host you select allows you to have forums. Since forums consume a lot of what is called ‘bandwidth’ and web space, some budget web hosts have a maximum on how much bandwidth and web space to use.
From my experience, if you start off with at least 1GB of space and 5 GB of bandwidth. That is MORE than you will need until your forum community is large enough to pay for itself on a larger web host, or even lease your own what is called ‘dedicated server’. Do a web search on Google for what a dedicated server is to find out more.
4. Driving Traffic to your community
If you have no visitors or members participating, your forum won’t grow. My advice is to start off the circle where you began. Within your network of online friends. These days with so many communities and social networking websites, there are so many to choose from why should anyone join YOUR community?
Well, you can use this network of websites to your advantage. Start off with the forums you are active in. If they allow you to advertise your forum or website, do it. Otherwise add a link to is in your signature. If you have thousands of posts your link on that forum will appear in thousands of places instantly!
Above all, make sure YOU are active and keep your community fresh and up to date about everything. Even if noone posts anything that day you and your moderators should be posting several times everyday! Try to provoke a conversation with your posts. Once members join and are active give them the honor of being initial moderators of your forum. This will encourage them and make them feel like they are part of your forum community and will keep their loyalty to your forum. In turn what will they do? Tell THEIR friends about it. Now you are beginning to see what is called a ‘viral’ effect to driving traffic to your website.
Most of all, do not give up. Keep talking about your forum and inviting people to join. The more passionate and excited you are about your forum, the more others will see that in you and your friends and will be willing to spend time on your forum to build it up.
Once you go through these initial steps to starting your online forum community you are on the right track to have a successful community. Once this happens, you can easily think about even being able to earn money from your website that will cover your costs and place some ‘spare change’ in your pocket. This is all of course if you have the right niche, the right forum script, the right webhost, and the right methods to drive traffic to your forum! To your success!
