Is it worth to make a forum?

Forums are always a good help for starters like us....were in you get good reviews about what you are planning to do.

Hope the reply helped you ..

Thanks & Regards
Robin

thank you , but how can i manage the copyrighting problem of the member ? should i hire moderators ?

Why are you considering starting a forum? Are you looking for a way to monetize it?

I will assume you are.

Anyways I don't know what niche you are in, but it would be much more effective and worthwhile for you to create a paid membership section on your blog. On your paid membership section you can offer more advanced content and information (e.g a course about your niche with a forum included for members only) for your blog visitors.

Let's do some math.

If you can offer more valuable, advanced content on your blog at a membership price of $50.00 per month and you can get at least 10 members, then you will be making $500.00 on autopilot.

All you have to then do is tp get more members to your site to grow your passive income.

Hope that helps!

Assuming you want to succeed...you should take into consideration that you will need a dedicated server. Those aren't cheap. Some people might be like "well I don't have a DS and I have a forum". Maybe so, but that just means that your forum sucks.

You also need to take into consideration that you'll have to deal with DDoS attacks on a regular basis, as well as scumbag scammers/spammers/bots. It isn't a picnic. Apart from the security, you'll have to moderate and market the forum. This will require you to find mods that can be trusted, since you probably can't afford to hire them.

You're probably in over your head. Appreciate an honest answer, especially if it saves you time, money, and energy.

Yes, it is worth making a forum if you want to increase engagement of your blog.

Forums are tough, but they can be a tremendous asset. I mean think about it. Instead of creating content for your site, you have potentially hundreds or even thousands of people creating unique content for you! Everyday! But you have to do moderation, clean up the forum to get rid of idiotic members, spammers, etc. This is a good forum service that you can use to get your own forum started up within the next 15 minutes. "websitetoolbox.com". Good luck!

Getting your own forum started takes a lot of work to set up but can be very rewarding years down the road.

Your biggest challenge will be to get people to come to it and join. This is going to be your biggest challenge and something that you will have to overcome if you want to have a successful forum.

forums are always good for people if you need a mod i can help im a mod of a facebook page that has 17K fans on it and i talk to each and everyone of them also if your going to start a forum maker sure you let everyone know on the front page of your site saying NEW UPDATE WE NOW HAVE A FORUM GO AND JOIN IT etc that will also help the members

It won't work out for you. Hard truth.

At some point or other, most internet marketers consider owning a forum. A minute percentage of them become successful. The majority start out being a labor of love that soon turn into a time and (often consequently) money hog.

Developing, establishing, growing, moderating, and monetizing a forum requires a fair-to-high level of capital investment, a great deal of technical and marketing know-how, writing chops should you decide to be an active member, and a hundred and one other elements that would take me 3 hours to talk about.

No offense intended, but I'm under the impression that you're a new internet marketer. If you do setup a forum, let it be at some stage in the future.

Tom

Owning the platform is good.

But if you can't get enough people interested, then it's a waste of time. You will be overrun by spammers and hackers. I had a phone sales forum for about a year and closed it down.

People have to know it EXISTS.

Then they have to be interested enough to post.

I'd say for every one poster, you need at least 100 lurkers. No joke.

And a forum is pretty poor if it only has two people posting. Looks fake. Like you hired these two to chatter back and forth to one another.

Look at most forums online. How many do you see that look like graveyards? A lot. Only a few get action. Can you create one that takes off? Sure. But you have to have massive value, which means having some top level posters available who believe in it the way you do.

And let's not forget the life cycle of a forum.

1 > Launch. It's secret and exciting. Participants are like a cult. It's fun to be on the "inside".

2 > Childhood. Participants "mean it". Only dedicated people truly interested in the subject matter are in on it. Knowledge of the forum is passed by word of mouth in low tones between smiling advocates with all the joy of a happy conspiracy.

3 > Maturity. The word has gotten out. The throng flocks to the forum in search of fast riches. Topics and discussions become so bloated and diluted, the original participants flee as if the Cylons have arrived and go make a new place to talk in a hidden location.

4 > Old Age and Death. Spam is the #1 product. Knowledge is rarely shared. Those who had a fire for the original topic have long since moved on. While the activity level may look high, that is only because the spammers are creating and bumping at warp speed. No actual value is being created any longer.

The payoff, of course, is if you can get that kind of buy-in and earnest participation, you own the platform. That's profit for years to come.

But it is essentially a full time job. And if you don't have say five to ten other "guiding lights" you can lean on to be moderators and expert content providers, don't do it. Most of them are going to fall by the wayside, too.

Why not! Thats a good idea. Start with a free one and build upon it and you might find it something and enjoyable and maybe even later monetize it.

Its going to take a planned amount of time daily to not only work on it but work in it and create the environment that you are looking for.

Thats a great idea

Forums take a long time to build up unless you have an enormous following that you can promote it to.

a forum is no different than starting a blog, sending traffic to affiliate offers, or building a list.

It takes time to build and grow an audience.

I used to run a forum for a not-for-profit group that I started. (Boy, if that wasn't the most thankless endeavor)...

Here are some of the hassles that I had to deal with:

• Paying for the forums. Since mine was a not-for-profit, my options to pay the fees were mostly out of pocket, except for donations. Now you aren't running a non-profit, but you'll still have fees.
• I used to think VBulletin was the best forum software, and it might still be...but beware it's very pricey, and their customer service is both expensive and lacking (and insulting, .unless you actually LIKE being talked down to with every support question).
• More recently, I discovered Simple Press. A much better option IMO if you want "simple" but still costs $99 annually, last I checked, if you want the plug-ins and the updates included (which you do).
• The technical stuff of running the forums gave me more headache than I care to recount here. Backing up and restoring databases is WAY out of my league, but I gave it my best shot to learn before recognizing that I need things as "dumbed down" as it can get. (Needless to say, if you don't know MYSQL, or can't pay someone who knows it, it's probably not a good idea to be running a forum.)
• I had to deal with some interesting characters: People who wanted to "argue" my terms and conditions all day long in order to join; people to joined under false aliases after being removed from the forum; fielding others' emails because THEY are having difficulty registering, or more often, because they have a problem with something someone else posted. I seriously bought myself a full-time, non-paying job, running those forums. I suppose you could have "paid" threads, but unless you're as big as Warrior Forum, it won't work well because...
• As stated above, the traffic issue. No one wants to post on a dead forum. But how do you get people to use it when there's no posts yet? A real Catch-22.
• Then there were those who would hack the forum with code, make it act crazy or shut down, for no apparent reason.
• Dude, I'm not kidding. I could go on all day. But hopefully this has helped you be able to look at it from the perspective of someone who's been there, done that. Or rather, tried to do that...LOL