8 Tips to Make Your Forum Thrive

Starting a new forum is one of the most difficult things that a webmaster, or anyone can undertake. The internet is flooded with forums of all shapes and sizes; from small science forums to multi-million user computer forums. This huge number of forums makes it very hard to start a new one.

There are already active ones, so why would anyone want to post on a new one with no members?

Here are ten tips that can help you start your forum:

1. Good Design – Having a good theme/template/design for your forum is critical. No one wants to post on forums that have cluttered, dirty and ugly looks. It will hurt their eyes and put them off posting or registering.

2. Tell Your Friends – I can guarantee you that normal people will not join a forum if it has no or very few members. To get your forum kick started then get all your friends and family posting. This will generate friendly discussion and make the forum look active.

3. SEO – Search Engine Optimization is something you must do if you want your forum to be successful. Doing this will get you high in search engine listings so you will get more visitors and registrations. You should start by adding a Meta keyword and description tag, after that the best way to go is getting search engine hacks/mods for your forum to create nice URLs.

4. Friendly Staff – Having a mean and power hungry moderation and staff team will scare visitors away and get you a bad reputation in the forum world, something that is hard to get rid of. Make sure that you have enough moderators to cover you forum and stop spammers etc. But not so many that it looks like there are no normal members. You should tell them to be friendly to all visitors, whether they broke the rules or no.

5. A Newsletter – Ok so you have got members to join your forum. Now you have around 100 members it looks respectable, but there is a problem, only 10 of them are active. This means the other 90 of them must have forgotten about your forum. You should send out a weekly or fortnightly email newsletter to all the members with news about your forum or news related to the topic your forum covers. Don’t make it look spammy and make sure that it is content rich, this will bring visitors back.

6. Advertise, Advertise & Advertise – No one will even visit your forum without advertising. SEO is only one part as well. You will also need to get people to link to your forum and tell others about it. You should start by submitting your forum to general directories, forum directories and directories about the topic you forum covers. This will get you both relevant and general link backs and knock up your SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

7. Make it Snappy – No one hates anything more than a site that takes hours to load. It will make your members frustrated and they will probably leave or not join. To make your forum fast you should fine some good webhosting, HostGator are good, and make sure that you don’t overload your forum with mods/plugins as these will slow it down. Also avoid free webhosting.

8. Incentivize – If your friends only make your forum seem a little active then you still have a problem. You should start off by doing some incentivizing. You should pay people to post on your forum and also pay them for every new member they refer. This could cost a bit but is worth it. You should stop as soon as it is active. Also make sure that people don’t make false referrals, check the IP addresses of the registrations.

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