Chicken / Egg question - RE: Forum Product

You don't: you have to threaten people to get them to pay.

The normal course is that you start by trying "If you pay, we'll send the boys round", and when you gradually learn that that's a sub-optimal approach, you eventually get to "If you don't pay, we'll send the boys round". And if that doesn't work either, well, you may then have to employ a "special consultant" (they often go by names like Mario, Luigi and Silvio - but remember that in the forum business, those can just be login-names and "their true identities may be yet to reveal themselves").

All of the community based forums I have been around from their beginning have been built around an existing community.

A group of mates with a similar interest start a forum and then they tell their mates...it spreads like that. Facebook would make this a lot easier these days.

Another community that many people have is their email lists. Your 'mates' are the people on your lists. If you don't have any mates int he industry you are trying to start you forum for then maybe spend some time before hand creating the community through a mailing list. When you are ready to strike tell them you have made this place to discuss everything.

There are usually extroverts in a group who will take the initiative and start some general conversation to break the ice.

If you are going for a membership forum then all of those ones I have jioned have always come pre-loaded with usefull content to help get a conversation started. People will have questions about this content and other threads will start from there.

Yea, I would have a hard time believing that a paid forum will start from scratch. I could be wrong, because I really don't know a lot about forums, but I would think paid forums develop in situations like what caused the warrior forum to revert to paid status (did they start paid from day one?).

You do always have the option of faking it (getting people to go there just to start up conversation), but I like avenuegirl's idea of offering a free membership to get people started. Making the free membership an option that someone can only receive through an advertisement would make them feel like they are getting a special deal and could entice them to join.

I just had to write something on this post even though I may not be tons of help with this particular subject, just because the thought of an empty paid membership forum made me cringe and I have the feeling it would do the same to others.

Best of luck to you


Wanted to add my response to the initial question. When it comes to a paid forum, I think your egg comes first.

Basically, you can't expect people to pay for membership to a forum that is empty. You will have to give away memberships to get things started. Some people even pay people to post in their forums to get them started. You really need to get content in there before you think about charging for memberships.

Have you thought about buying several other forums in or near your niche and using those posts to seed your forum? You can either give the current members members for life subscriptions for a token or free or for a year etc - and then charge all new members through the nose to get into your 'brand new' forum. (you can rename it, spruce it up etc) I know vbulletin allows importing but not sure if other forum scripts do or not.

Just a thought. Its what a lot of offline business do when they want more customers - you can grow them over time, buy them, or acquire them from your competitors by buying your competitors.

good luck,
--Jack

Would I pay for a product that does not exist? No.

Or to put it another way, if I logged in and found little value to justify the price, then I would ask for a refund.

Look at just about all paid dating services. They started off as free to build a database and a name in the industry. Then they changed small fees and then gradually increased the price.

Another business model is the forum as a complimentary product to a paid product. People buy product A and have access to forum B. As a critical mass level, the forum is split out and made into a separate service. Existing users are grandfathered in.

I agree that an almost empty forum will struggle to attract anyone to post there for free, without taking into account them paying a fee for access. Terrapurus's suggestion is a good one, and I have seen that work well - create a product, allow them access to a forum as part of their purchase, and you're away.

Usually, you do this by making the forum itself free, then charging for specific features.

The critical first job of a forum is to get 150 members as quickly as possible; that makes the community effectively self-sustaining, because the law of averages will guarantee that someone is always interested in posting about something.

But if you have to pay to get in, it can be hard to position properly.

Another option, similar to what terrapurus suggested, is to give 30 or 60 days free forum access to purchasers of a product or service that you know can sell 150 copies quickly. Then you just have to encourage those people to post, usually by running some sort of competition, and you have a continuing influx of people from the product sales. Once you get 150 people to start paying the monthly fee at the end of their trial, flip off the bonus access for product buyers, and market it separately.

To be honest, I have been one of the self doers.

Few methods I can tell, which you may have to try and find out yourself.

But remember not to try this on your main forum first or simply make a back up copy of your forum before you do this, so its easy to recover the original forum if something goes wrong.

1) There are few software's that put many views in your forum posts/threads (shown to visitors)

2) Buy paid traffic and wait for 1 month at least. It shows your website getting plenty of visitors in many graphs and even Alexa rankings are effected to some extent

3) There are paid forum posters who do forum posting jobs dirt cheap for requested keywords/topics as posters and responders (they charge .20 to $1 per post - I think)

4) Do some advertising and buy some PR (for reputation)

I don't know how this may sound to you, but that's the best do-it-yourself solution I could think of, for now. As I am planing few forums myself.

I am sure, if you put your mind to these aspects, you won't have trouble getting these resources at a very low price. Once done successfully, you would know better how to replicate in future.

Forums are tough. Its a chicken and egg situation, you need constant content to bring people and constant people to create content.

Go to fiverr and hire some people to post for you perhaps. The main thing with a forum is you need to create a critical mass, an explosion that sparks the forum into a life of its own, like sending a charge into a frankensteins monster.

You also need top post yourself...a lot.

You need at least 200 people to get around 10 regulars I have found, so you need signups, and that means making it free.

Only charge for access to a forum area when you hit 1000+ members at the very least.