How to start a forum - Part 2

In the 2nd part of this article I’ll explain you how to promote your forum, attract members, good posters and everything else that I haven’t mentioned in the 1st part.

So, now that you have know about how to choose a domain and about the scripting part, let’s move further with tips on promoting your forum to attract more members. To be honest, the number one priority of any forum administrator is to get maximum traffic to their forum, so that they can capitalize and get more advertising dollars. There are different ways in which you can achieve this goal.

The best way to seek attention of others is to provide good quality information. Of course, there may be other forum sites, which might be more popular than yours and probably that has more traffic than yours, but remember, “where there’s Quality, there’s crowd”. If your forum has good quality information, you may gradually get more and more traffic through word of mouth publicity, and more and more people would come to your site to complete their quest of information.

Also, while deciding the forum guidelines, please remember to keep it simple and straight. Do not over censor and use ambiguous statements, which may confuse the members. Treat every member in the same way and make guidelines that you think are morally correct and fair to everyone on your forum. While selecting moderators for your forum web site make sure that their primary motive is to help the community, and not financial gain.

If you have a budget for giving away incentives and rewards to your members for contributing good quality information, do it. Incentives and rewards can provide great boost to the members, to provide more top quality posts on your forum, which will in return get more traffic to your forum web site. You can inform your moderators to select one or two members who have contributed immensely to your forum, or you can create some kind of contest and reward members who start the best or most active threads.

Another way to get in more members on your forum web site is through the posters. It does not sound convincing, but it works. The overall look of your forum web site, posters, and easy options provided to the members can really give your forum site a competitive edge. Always remember that to make your forum site attractive and popular, you have to keep it organized to draw in more visitors.

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Don’t Go Into a Saturated Niche

I used to think this kind of advice went without saying, but as I see more and more crappy web hosting businesses popping up throughout the internet, I wonder just what people are thinking.  There are already soooooo many hosting businesses out there, the quality, and the crappy.  Most people are already with the good hosts, such as Bluehost, HostGator, LunarPages, and DreamHost.  So, what is the purpose of creating yet another business in a field that already has it’s share of crappy ones, especially if you are going to do a crappy job with yours.  If you are going to start a business, stick behind it, and put forth 100%, otherwise yous will end up in the gutter with the thousands of others that did the exact same thing that you did.  I mean, look, if you want to create a high quality web hosting business, with top notch customer service, by all means, please do it, but don’t overextend, and don’t give up.  Business is slow for all new businesses, it’s just cliff you have to climb, and you’ll never get to the top if you give up.

Most upstart businesses that die off real quick are in already saturated niches anyway, becuase there’s no concievable way for them to compete with the giants of the business.  So, what’s the solution?  Simple, find another niche.  There’s a ton of business opportunities out there, but you have to be willing to look around and find them.  Personally, I just found a great business idea, that I’m working on capitalizing.  Of course, it’s in a very unsaturated niche, where most of the businesses in it do a crappy job anyway.  This is the type of opportunity you need to look for.  If you can find something like this, you’ll be a rich man (or woman) down the line, because you found the demand, and created the supply for it.

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Why Your Business Should Use Google Apps

Google Apps, free web apps provided by google have become very popular for personal use, but not as much so for business use.  Why?  Well, this is mainly because most people think that they have to have a GMail, or GoogleMail, account in order to use these services, but they are wrong.

You can actually sign up for a Google ID without a GMail account, the only thing is, you won’t be able to use GMail to check and respond to the email you have on your domain, unless your host supports POP3 access to the select few ports that GMail offers.  For people and businesses who use BlueHost and other hosts like it, which use port 26, and an obscure SSL port, the option to simply use GMail isn’t available.

This is where Google Apps comes in.  You can sign up for a free account for your domain, which gives you Google Docs, Google Mail, Google Talk, and Google Sites, all on your domain.  This means you’ll be easily able to use GMail with your own domain to check and respond to all of your email.  The additions of Docs,  and GTalk are all pluses, because they allow you to collaborate with other people, whom you will be able to add account on your domain for.  The best part of all of this, is Google Apps for your domain is free up to your first 50 users, and for most small businesses, this is not a problem, but for those businesses who do need more users $50 per year isn’t all that much at all.  Plus, you’ll be getting top notch support from Google with any problems you might have, as they give you a telephone number to call, instead of waiting for email support in the free version.  Another thing I noticed is that you can’t use GMail Themes in Google Apps, but I’m hoping for that to change soon, once they become more stable.

There’s isn’t really much to setting up Google Apps, either, so if you’ve set up your own hosting, and have bought a domain, and know how to set nameservers, you’ll be able to set them up fine, and you’ll be up and running in no time.  Google does provide pretty clear instructions, and I was able to set it up even though they didn’t have specific instructions for BlueHost, and I by no means consider myself an expert.  So, what are you waiting for?  You can be using Gmail to read and respond to emails on your own domain today!

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Free Accounting Solutions For Your New Business

Accounting software tends to run on the expensive side, but it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of money just to keep track of it.  Here’s some solutions for you that allow you to keep track of your business or even person finances without spending a penny.

P.S.: This will be updated as frequently as possible to show new solutions.

GNU Cash
http://www.gnucash.org/

This open source accounting program is the best of the best when it comes to freely available programs, and it even competes with most of the programs you have to buy.  It’s a very powerful and flexible program that allows you to track things like bank account, mutual funds, stocks, and your basic incomes and expenses as well as many other things.

Intuit QuickBooks Simple Start Free Edition 2009
http://quickbooks.intuit.com/product/accounting-software/free-accounting-software.jsp

This is basically a fully featured version of QuickBooks that you can use for up to 20 customers.  It’s really, really good for tracking income and expenses and keeping things tax ready, but it’s not so great if you have over 20 customers.

Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2009
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/accountingexpress/FX101729681033.aspx

Microsoft hardly releases things for free, so when it does, I take notice.  I have to say, I wonder why they release this program for free, it’s basically the same as QuickBooks, but you don’t have to pay for it.  It is lacking some advanced features, but for a small business, it’s a great, free solution.  It even integrates with eBay!

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