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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How to Start a Forum - Part 1

Forums are very popular websites nowadays. Surfing on the Net you can see hundreds and thousands of forums: some very successful and some that are crappy. Like every kind of website, forums require a lot of work to be decent and popular. In this 2-part article, I’ll show you show to start your own forum.

First things come first
Choosing the best possible domain and most proper hosting is very important. You can choose a brandable domain or a relative one. Regarding to the hosting: the host on the start must guarantee uptime mostly than other specs (like space, bandwidth, domain, databases etc.). That’s because the forum will be new and doesn’t need a lot of space, bandwidth etc. After you’re set up with hosting and a domain name it’s time to go to the script.

Choosing the right script
In the “world of forums” there are 3 widely used scripts: 1. phpBB 2. vBulletin 3. SMF . The best is vBulletin. If you use that it shows to every visitors or member high professionality. The “negative” side of vBulletin is that you have to pay for it. After vBulletin comes phpBB. It’s the best free forum script. The “negative” side is that modifications are very hard to install (if you’re not skilled). SMF is also good, comes after phpBB and has some very nice features. I recommend you go for vB if you have good budget or phpBB if you don’t have the needed budget.

Installing the script
This is not very hard on phpBB or SMF as you can install them directly from cPanel of your host by using Fantastico. vBulletin is a bit more difficult to install because you must create database, upload files and some other steps to install it. Go here for a full vBulletin installation tutorial.

Make the forum ready to launch
After you’ve finished installing the script now it’s time to configure it in the best way for your kind of forum. First of all, choose a good design. That’s fundamental in attracting visitors to register and stay part of the forum. You can buy a premium theme, get a custom one (expensive) or download a free theme. Now that you have the theme you’ll need some custom design that are: official logo, headers with the logo and empty ad spaces. Hire a designer to design those.

After the whole design of your forum is finished comes the other difficult part in configuring: setting the right script options and installing plugins. Plugins can be easily found in the respective official scripts forums. (vbulletin.org and phpbb.org). After that, depending on your forum’s niche you must create a good system of categories and subcategories with descriptions.

Give a “push” to the forum
Before you launch the forum you need some active topics so that new members will have where to post. Make threads your self and invite friends to post. Till now nothing’s official yet. Your forum is unknown and only with a few posts by you and your friends. 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 first.

Thank you for your time,
Arlind

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