ArunChandran.com

It is important that you keep your website updated. The easiest way to do this is by creating a community. I am sure that there are a lot of you who have heard about the awesome power of having an online forum community. A community helps you to generate revenue, rank better on google, provide a better service to the visitors and increase traffic through repeat visitors. With lots of information and discussion being exchanged in your forums visitors will return again and again to see replies to their posts, read others posts and basically to see if anything has changed.

It can be a place for people to discuss issues, share knowledge and an ideal place to promote your products and your services.

Decide a niche topic for your forum. This will attract your core audience. Do not add many sub forums that are not relevant to the main topic. There are so many forum scripts you can choose from. I would suggest you to start off with a free forum script that has the feature to ‘migrate’ forum information to another forum script at any point in time. Start off with the free SMF forum script. This is the most powerful free script available. Even most web hosts have it as a part of their package.

Depending on your budget to start off with, do a search on Google for the keyword: “Cheap Linux Hosting”. Go through a couple of websites on your Google search and decide which one you need. Never make the mistake of starting a forum off with free hosting. You will have tons of advertisements on your site that will annoy your members and ultimately make them leave. Select a web host within your budget, and make sure that the host you select allows you to run forums. Start off with at least 20GB of space and 500 GB bandwidth. Going for Virtual private server is a wise decision. You won’t have the need to move a dedicated server for a couple months.

Once you have everything up, you expect visitors to join as a member! If you have no visitors or members, your forum will never grow. Start off with the forums that all you to advertise your forum or website. Digital point is a good community to start with. Add a link to is in your signature. Your signature will appear on all your posts instantly! Make sure you are always active even if no one posts anything that day. Once members start joining in and are active make them moderators of sub communities. This will make them feel like they are part of your forum community.

Make the registration process an easy as possible as people aren’t going to join if they’ve to fill out a long form which asks for every other detail. Just ask for username, name and email address for a start.

You need people in your forum and you need them to be talking about things that will get others to join in. People don’t like to join empty forums so you will need to get a people together and start posting topic others would be interested in talking about. You need to invest some time into making your forum look professional. Getting people to post in your forum is probably the hardest thing to do. First, not all of your readers will post messages. In fact, only a small percentage will post regularly, and most will never post at all. A great way to get people to start talking is by starting contests. Put the contest details in on the main page or post it as a global announcement. You can offer them free software or even cash. I have seen forums offering some cash gift for people with highest posts every week and they do work well.

You should start your forum with less than 5 categories, then slowly expand and create more categories. This way, the forums does not look so empty. Use the polling features of SMF software to your advantage.

If you have a forum with a decent traffic then you may find that you can sell advertising space through private ads.

You can put some adverts like Google Adsense on your forum in such a way that it does not affect the forum navigation. An even better way to make money is if you can directly sell services or products to your members. For example a forum on web hosts can offer web hosting directly. You can send newsletters to forum members with special offers and only available to them. Do not send emails every day otherwise they will leave your forum. These are quickest and easiest ways to turn your forum into a source of income.