How to start a forum

I would start with a mailing list first. You dont want to start a forum with five people. You need to send 500 people there at once to get energy and attraction power happening. Also out line all of your subforums first and create several ops in each, on subjects relevant to your mailing lists interest.

I know a few people who have started forums. The best way to grow a successful forum is to find a few like minded people who want to post stuff and will help you grow the site.

If it would be about cars, I would have the forum setup ready for you in 10 languages.

What I would do is, look at 10-20 forums and see what is similar in them, then you know what to choose.

Hi jfingaz123,

I'm not sure if this is an ethical answer, but I've personally seen people do it on here.

Go find similar forums in your niche, and find the people who seem to be the "experts" there. Those with a ton of helpful posts. Then, simply message them with an offer for free advertising/traffic.

When they respond, offer them a free banner on your site in exchange for a certain number of helpful posts per day on your forum. Maybe to start off, they have to post at least 40 times before the agreement begins.

This would build a bunch of good content in the beginning pretty fast.

Hope that helps.

find your specific niche - choose a hosting program - create forum & first discussions - find some supporters to make a first bunch of comments - advertise

Forums are tough. It's a catch 22. It's best if you use it as your primary source of income. Some people like to create fake forum posts in the beginning to make it look like it's active everyday. It's whatever to me. Make sure you have some kind of lead capturing/signup form on your forum that's easy to view, and don't run them through so many loops when they register.

jfingaz,

So what do you have that Firerr doesn't? What are you offering that other similar forums don't have? What is unique about your web site?

Said another way . . . Why do you hope that prospects will choose you over the other more established sites that are already getting the traffic you want?

It seems to me, you don't have a compelling reason for prospects to come to your site. You've heard the saying "What's in it for me?" Put yourself in the prospect's shoes then answer that question truthfully. If you can't come up with one or more good answers then you'd better get to work and figure it out.

Good luck to you,

Steve

I hate to say it but if you want to build a fast growing forum, you have to pay experts or knowledgeable people to post.

Why?

They are 'seeding' your forum

You then hire others to publicize the posts at niche-specific blogs/FB groups/FB pages/Twitter feeds, etc etc

Do a search on Udemy there are tons of courses teaching you from scratch how to create a forum like this one.

However, you need to pay for hosting fees, vBulletin subscription and also prepare to lose some money as your forum needs to be famous to make money.

Set the forum to display a list of recent a discussions as your “homepage view” to encourage interactions. Seed the community with topics that start discussions and leverage any existing content you have. SEO will play a big part of getting new members, so think hard before launching your forum in private mode. Create some fake personalities.

Overall, first analyse your sucesful competitors and see what tree-structre they 've build for their visitors. Don't try to invent a new 'bike'

It's true that the Search feature is a let-down for this term ("how to start a forum" and similar.) Nothing relevant came up.

So you have two big challenges in starting a forum:

1 > Technical

and

2 > User base.

Technical issues go far beyond picking the framework.

You're constantly going to have to fight spam. Bot user registrations. Garbage posts. People trying to inject nasty code.

The user base starts off at 1. You. Who else is going to come here?

What's the draw?

You need to get this figured out BEFORE setting anything technical up. What's the attraction?

Why should people come to your forum and participate?

How are people going to know your forum exists?

Keep in mind the ratios are typically something like 100 non-participating wallflowers lurking to soak up knowledge from 1 active participant.

Hopefully the active participant has expertise and knows what they're doing, huh.

You'll see some people say "hire people to create content and interact" but that kind of fake interaction is spotted pretty quickly.

Running an active forum is a full time job for one person. Be ready for the commitment--this isn't something you just turn on and walk away from. It's like a baby that needs constant attention and watchfulness for trouble.

Hey There,

Start with your list!

Build a squeeze page and give them a free product (eBook, PDF, Video Series, etc.) to give them as soon as they subscribe

Then send them only valuable content (do not promote anything to them)

Then once you build a sizable list create a Facebook or social media page to promote to them and start building a community.

Keep pumping out valuable and insightful emails/facebook post and once that's doing great go ahead and tell them your working on a forum.

Build the forum page and once it's built promote it to them!

It's that simple

(not saying it's easy, but it's simple)

Hope this helps

Adam

You definitely need people on there to facilitate discussion. Basically keep members engaged as they visit the forum. Aside from useful content, people need a sense of community to keep posting.

You can start a simply thread which people in the forum can interest your post.

Great advice here guys, thanks. I'm in the process of getting my own new forum up and running pretty soon (my goal is to make it similar to the Marketing Checkpoint forum)

I think I will use freeforums dot net as it looks to be a pretty straightforward, userfriendly interface.

Great thread, I always wondered how forum things work, now I have some ideas, which I could use myself. Thanks

Starting a forum is easy. First of all you needs a domain. Purchase a domain from a good reputated website and install that. Then purchase a hosting from a good company and connect with your domain and update DNS settings. Remember: It will be better if your hosting has pre-installed phpbb or v-bullitin. You can install one of them and start your forum. If you need any help about me, kindly know me in massage, I will help you.

Thanks.