The Extensive Guide To Starting A Successful Forum

Forums are a great way to generate traffic and interest in your new or existing site. A forum, when done well, will help you achieve great search engine ranking for your product, service, or community. This guide is not about how to do a forum for cheap, its about how to do a forum right. I cannot guarantee that you will make any return or even have a successful forum, but my advice will give you the best potential. You should have a budget of at least $350, which is nothing compared to the amount of residual income a forum can make you. Lets start with the basics..

Domain Name:

If this is a brand new site, I highly recommend using www.GoDaddy.com as your domain name registrar. They have some of the best prices, best customer support and probably the best domain name manager system that I have seen.

When choosing a domain try to stay away from names that will be confused with your competitors. For instance, if your competitor is bobsforum.com, do not use bobforum.com. Your customers will be confused and you will probably lose a lot of them to bobsforum.com. Try to think of something unique, and if possible, use some keywords in the name.

I like to use SEO Book’s keyword suggestion tool when Im trying to think of a keyword domain name. Type in several keywords relating to your business into that tool to see what people are searching for. Obviously you also want something that is catchy, so if your forum is about wheelchairs, and you see that people are searching for “wheelchairs for sale”, dont name your forum wheelchairsforsale.com. Try to grab wheelchairforum.com.

Hosting your new site

I have hosted at a lot of places over the years and some of the best pricing and service I have received is from HostGator.com. They have always been really good to me, especially on the service end. Quick responses, and they are good about walking people through any issues that arise. Your emails will explain how to setup your server and point your domain name to them.

No matter who you go through, make sure that your hosting includes PHP and a MySQL database.

Forum Software

Many people try using free forum software to start their forum. Sometimes this works, but here are a few reasons to start off with a $160 license from vBulletin:

1. vBulletin is the industry standard, most forum geeks already know how to use it
2. 24/7 Customer Support
3. Extensive community behind it to support you
4. Extensive Plugins(most of them free) to help you build your commnunity and keep your members interests
5. Best SEO(Search Engine Optimization) software available for it (we will get to that later)
6. You are probably going to need to switch to vBulletin down the road anyways and importing is NOT fun.
7. If you pay for it, its an investment and will drive you to make sure your forum is successful

Believe me, I have tried several different forum software out there, and my most successful ones were built with vBulletin. Its easy to manage, and adding features is a breeze.

Once you purchase the forum license, you will be able to download the software and then upload it to your server. I highly recommend renaming the “upload” folder to “forum” and upload that folder to your root directory. The root directory is your base directory, often seen as /public_html/. So you would want to have your forum at /public_html/forum/. Having your forum in a folder in your root directory will allow you to grow and not limit yourself to JUST a forum. It will allow you to have a custom home page, and add several other features to your new site.

vBulletin Startup

I am not going to go through the installation process of vBulletin with you. vBulletin does a much better job of that than I could, and my purpose in this article is to help you make your forum successful, not hold your hand.

If initially you dont know what to do for your home page, just forward it to your forum using a simple php redirect. First, create a file called index.php and put it in your servers root directory (/public_html/index.php). DO NOT put it in your forum folder. Put this code in your index.php file and upload it to the server:

header('Location: http://www.sitename.com/forum/');
?>

For information on installing and editing your forum visit the vBulletin Online Manual

If at this point you are wondering how to get people to your forum and posting, dont have an ulcer, we are almost there.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization otherwise known as “SEO” is one of the key elements to having a successful forum. If you want people to find you using Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search engines without paying a ton of money, you need to have your site optimized. The best way to do this with vBulletin is to purchase vBSEO. vBSEO will optimize your URL’s to include keywords, it will protect you from some of the non-SEO features that come with vBulletin, and it will also ping Google and Yahoo to come visit your site. vBSEO basically will take a stock vBulletin site that Google and other search engines dont necessarily like, and make them like it. There have been numerous stories of forums doubling their traffic after installing vBSEO.

Purchase vBSEO

Make sure you read through all of the vBSEO documentation. You will learn so much about SEO, and how to drive traffic to your site.

How do I get people to post on my site?

Now for the hard part. At this point you should have your forum installed and optimized for search engines. So how do you get people to come to your site and how do you get them to stay?

First off, even though your site is primed for SEO, Search Engines will not be able to help you unless you have content for them to scour and index. Also, potential members will just leave if they see that the forum is empty. Here are a few suggestions to getting content on your site:

1. Post every day.
2. Have a reviews/articles section on the forum and write reviews and articles relating to the forum theme as often as possible.
3. Have a post party at your house where you and your friends can just sit down and discuss important topics on the forum relating to your forum theme. If you want to know what kind of content to discuss, use the SEO BOOK Keyword Suggestion Tool to help you figure out what people are searching for. For instance, maybe if your forum was about Ford Pinto’s, you would type in “ford pinto” in the keyword suggestion tool and find that people are searching for “best ford pinto intake”, “how to replace ford pinto transmission”, and write about those things. This way, when search engines crawl your site, you will have good content for them to index your site with. Chances are, you will eventually start getting found for the topics that you write about.
4. Take advantage of RSS Feeds. I will not go into how to set RSS feeds up on your site, but vBulletin has support for RSS Feeds. Meaning, you can go to your favorite articles sites or blogs and plug their articles into your site using RSS. This is not the best way as the content on your site will not be original, and most of the rss feeds will just link back to the articles sites.
5. If you have an existing customer base that would be interested in your forum, send out an email letting them know you are starting a new forum. You will be surprised at how many people actually get excited about being the first to post on your forum.

Ok, Forum has members, and they are posting. Now what?

1. Post every day.
2. Answer PM’s
3. Make sure unanswered posts get answered
4. When you see a good member that is faithful in posting every day, and loves helping people, thank him and give him the option of becoming a moderator as a reward for his efforts. People love having Moderator status. Makes them feel valued.
5. Follow up on moderators, keeping good communication with them and occasionally rewarding them for their efforts. I like to stay away from paying moderators, it kind of changes things. However, I do like giving my moderators gift cards, free t-shirts, and depending on the theme of your forum, free product.
6. Keep things alive. Make sure there is updated industry news for people to read as often as possible.
7. Have competitions. If the forum is automotive related, have a “car of the month” contest and try to get vendors/manufacturers to sponsor the contest with some kind of prize.
8. Make sure your site has a photo gallery. People love coming back to look at pictures.

Wrapping up

I hope that this post was helpful. I will add to, and edit this post as much as possible. Remember, running a forum is not easy, and a successful forum requires a daily commitment. In my next article I will show you how to make money with your forum, which will help make your daily commitment worth it.