Good Reasons To Build A Community Forum
A Step-By-Step Guide To Building A Community Forum (Part I)
by Fernando Hal(cheatad.com)
Nowadays, making money online is almost synonymous with starting a blog and plastering Adsense all over the place. Truth to be told, it has become the easiest way to start a website. If you haven’t got a blog, get started right away with WordPress Famous 5 Minute Installation.
But blog isn’t the only way to start a website. Community forum too is a great way to start an online presence and (if you want to) make money online. In fact, my most successful sites with largest Adsense contributions comes from community forums.
There are of course some difference between starting a blog and a community forum. Here we summarize the main difference between Forums and Blogs:
| Blog | Forum | |
| Content | Self-published | User-contributed |
| Main Challenge | Getting visitors | Getting visitors, getting user contributions |
| Maintenance | Continuous posting, moderating user comments, replying user comments | Moderating user postings |
| Self-hosted software | WordPress, Movable Type | phpbb, vBulletin |
| Hosted solutions | Blogger, WordPress | Forumer.com, FreeForums.org |
In simple terms, we can put it this way:
For blogs, all you need to do (after creating the blog) is to keep on publishing good unique articles. Blogs are generally easier to be indexed by search engines, so after a while, probably after 10-20 posts you’ll start attracting visitors. Depending on your topics / niche, you can easily get constant traffic of 1000 visitors a day with 100 posts. The catch is: you have to continue writing more articles to get higher number of visitors. Once you stop publishing new articles, the traffic will be stagnant, or even drop.
Compare that with forums. It is undeniably harder to kick-start a community forum. After installation, you’ll need to create categories and forums, and start posting interesting articles. To make it look lively, most forums start by creating multiple fake profiles that are posting good topics and reply to each others’ topic. You’ll probably start to see visitors only after creating 10 profiles and 30-40 postings. After 100-200 “fake postings”, you’ll get postings from your real visitors. And to get your first 1000 visitors a day, you’ll need much more than 1000 postings.
So, it is harder to start a forum. But why would we want to start a forum anyway?
The starting part is hard, but after your community is established with visitors regularly posting and replying to each other, the forum site basically goes on auto-pilot mode.
Engaged members will help promote your forum, so much that you don’t even need to do any marketing work. With more user-contributed postings and referred visitors, your forums will grow even bigger and bigger.
You don’t need to post any new articles, just concentrating in moderating user postings. Or if you find that too hard to do alone, you can also ask your active and more senior forum members to be moderator. That can be paid or volunteer work, depending on your topic and the member commitment to the community.
In short, starting a forum site is really a good way to build a lasting community that will continue to grow even when neglected.
Tomorrow I’ll post about how to start a forum. Stay tuned !
In the mean time, let me know what you think in the comment box below.
Cheatad ! SEO, Google Adsense & Technolgy Blog
Hi Fernando, both Forumer.com & FreeForums.org do not allow sponsored ads. Do you know of any that can display sponsored ads? Thanks.
dom.
Hi Fernando, self-hosted forum like phpBB or vBulletin is the answer. Correct me if I’m wrong. Thanks.
dom.
Yup. Those 2 are my favorite. There are others also, like IPB Board and Simple Machines Forum (SMF)
Fernando, do u ever used any paid forum posting services for your forums? If yes, which one do u recommend? If no, why didnt u?
Hope I didnt make u feel annoyed lol!
Glad that you ask. I never use paid forum posting service. Most of the times the postings are spam-like unrelated bunches of text. That’s not going to help your forum. Try asking friends to participate instead.
Quote:”Try asking friends to participate instead.”
And give them a share of the adsense commission haha! It is kind of hard to get the same head.
Can I have your email? Got something personal to ask u offline.
That if you don’t mind, but you don’t really have too.
I see that you have quite a number of people talking in the shoutbox in your blog. These too are your friends. When I started a forum, what I did was emailing every one of my friends, ask them to participate, register an account and make at least 3 post each. Also follow up and make sure they do it.
Of course, you need to make sure at least there is something going on already in the forum. I mean, you’ll need to work extra hard in the starting.
Hey Forum-
Thought I would Introduce Myself and say I am excited about being apart of the Forum. Looking Forward to providing good input and reading some as well.