Forum creation, tips, guidelines and useful hints.

I would start right away with some contests for the most active posters, most helpful posters with some exciting prices. In order to build up an active forum you will need to do a bit of the promotion at the beginning to make your forum busy. There are also services that will post first forum posts for you so it's not empty when you start promoting it.

1. Flexible forums. PHPBB if you don't have any money and are willing to fight spambots, IPB if you can afford it. Invision is incredibly easy to customize. Make sure to use an SEO plugin.

2. No, get a regular hosting plan as you start and worry about VPS and stuff after you've got a few thousand members.

3. Target a keyword, write good content, disperse it in many forms of media (video, etc) - this ties into 4, yeah you'll need content.

4. There are faster and easier ways to make money. For the effort you go through making a forum of 1000, only 5-10% of whom will probably post with regularity, you could build a mailing list.

Paid forum postings look like paid forum postings, IMO.

Get a plan that involves others. As much as the desire to "run a forum" or whatever on your own sounds, the diversity of people and their friends/contacts will be invaluable to helping establish your forums from the get-go.

Content. You need people who will either write about those topics, post detailed threads on those topics, etc.. I run a local Offroading forum and if it wasn't for my guys who post their Build Up Threads about their 4x4s, product reviews, mechanical knowledge, etc. the site would be dead in the water with substandard and unoriginal content like all the others. Consider a partner or two from the onset so you have multiple people with skin in the game.

Forums are not instant money makers unless you get gobs of traffic from the start and have a topic that's explosive and everyone wants to be a part of. Check out all of those "admin forums" and you will see the same 20 guys trying to make the same 20 forums and only have the same 20 guys posting on their sites.. Without a gameplan that's the road you'll end up on like 95% of the forums that start nowadays. I'm not saying you can't do it, but good planning goes a LOOOOOONG way.. I'm an off the cuff kinda guy and did mine with no planning but I had a niche market I'm personally involved in that was pretty much untapped for my area and I was able to slide into place and start building the online nest. We have meet and greets, competitions, trips to offroad parks, etc.. all things the members want. It was built from a core of 10-15 people from Day 1. We're not huge yet (only several months old) but passed 25k posts and not a single one was paid/exchanged/etc. all legit content.

Hosting start small work your way into a big server. I made my first move ~2 months ago and went to a host that's dedicated to only vBulletin forums. They've been awesome to deal with and the site has never run better.

If you really love the topic, go for it. If it's an idea just to cash out on, it'll probably go nowhere without lots of planning.. Just my opinion, either way I wish you the best in whatever you end up doing!

PHPBB has a pretty big learning curve..definitely check out SMF.

For site promotion...SEO guest blog posts...hands down...

Check out Famous Bloggers...

I suggest checking out XenForo. XenForo is developed by former vBulletin lead developers Kier Darby and Mike Sullivan. Add-on developers are working on and have released a few ad management add-ons. Below are a few of them.

• XenFx Ad Manager
• [bd] Rotating Ads
• Affiliates on SideBar
• Slider Banner Manager