Grow Your ForumsEducating You on Forums

I am changing the look of the blog to the Options theme by Justin Tadlock. I will also be using bbPress for the forum. Be sure to check back soon as I am working on getting this blog going again. I paid for 3 years web hosting so I better put in my moneys worth lol

Update: ugh, there are no phpbb to bbpress converters. So I will be sticking with phpBB for now although I am currently looking for a new wordpress theme that will serve  as my permanant theme

Popularity: 38% [?]

well, this blog isnt going so hotly. I will be trying to revive this blog.

I have grown wiser in the blogging ways since starting this so be on the lookout for better posts.

In the meantime check out my BookWorms United blog.

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I just wanted to put in a little note about the GYF directory. It is for forums ONLY. This is clearly written in the submission rules and guidelines. Any other type of site is deleted unless I am able to see a link to your forum then I just edit your link for you.

People don’t seem to be getting it, they either can’t read or are hoping I will just approve it without checking it out. The most annoying sites so far are the classifieds websites.

Once again I will say “The directory is for forums only!“.

Popularity: 45% [?]

The vBulletin team has announced that vBulletin 3.7.0 has finally reached the Gold stage and has been released as a stable/supported release. Version 3.6 will be supported for now but soon it will be ended. It is recommended that all members upgrade their vBulletin forums to 3.7.0. It is available for download from the members area.

There are improvements to the existing features as well as many new ones. Some of these features include
* Inline spam management & prevention
* Thread tagging
* Search cloud / tag cloud
* Thread prefixes
* Reciprocal friendships between users
* Public visitor messaging on profile pages with ‘conversation’ feature
* User picture galleries with user comment facility
* User-created social groups with invite only and moderated membership options
* Extended member profile pages
* Customizable member profile pages with admin-controlled styling abilities
* Inline editing of custom user profile fields
* Lightbox viewer for attached images
* Viewable and comparable history maintained for post edits
* Extended re-authentication for inline moderation actions
* Notices system for navigation bar
* Multiple human-verification systems including reCAPTCHA, image verification and Q/A
* User change history
* Social bookmarking integration

It requires PHP 4.3.3 or over as well as Mysql 4.0.16

Popularity: 100% [?]

First off, I have bumped up my posting schedule to once a week

This week I will be talking about adding a forum to popular CMS, Joomla.

Do you have a website that is powered by Joomla and want to integrate a forum into it? There are many ways that you can do that, with either a bridge, a module or a component. The most obvious one would be the Fireboard or Joomlaboard. There are also integration modules for SMF, and phpBB

They range from being fairly east to being complete headscratchers. If you read the instructions that come with the download step by step then you shouldn’t have a problem. You can find these “hacks” at http://extensions.joomla.org, joomlahacks.com and by doing a simple Google search for “Joomlaboard” or “integrate forums with joomla”

The fireboard can be a bit buggy and personally I don’t like it. I personally wouldn’t want to have my forum connected with Joomla because if I were to miss something up then the whole site would go down and I would probably have to rebuild either the forum or the website.

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We have now added a new forums directory to our site. It is available at directory.growyourforums.com. Feel free to submit your forums as long as the content isn’t adult, warez or illegal. Featured links are 10.95 for a lifetime! We are not looking to make truckloads of money, just enough to pay the hosting bills .

Regular links are free, and the reciprocal link is entirely optional! So that would mean a free backlink! Of course, the directory is no-follow free so it will help boost your search engine ranking. Of course, it would be nice to have some links back to here, hint hint.

I am currently compiling a list of free and paid directories and am collecting alexa and google PR for them so check back in two weeks

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I would recommend that people just starting out with forums use a free forum software. That way if you decide that you don’t want to use forums, it won’t be a waste of your money. For my own forum I have decided to use phpBB3 due to having a low budget. Again, I recommend anyone who has a low budget go with free forum software. The top two free forum softwares that are well known are phpBB and SMF (Simple Machines Forum). There are a number of free forum hosting websites that offer phpBB or SMF. I will be discussing these at a later date.

Paid forum softwares are good too. They are more likely to have more features, and are highly customizable. The top two paid forum softwares that I would recommend are vBulletin and IPB. Many professional websites use vBulletin, and there are currently no free hosting for this software. IPB (Invision Power Board), is also a well known paid forum software which unlike vBulletin, is offered for free by many free forum hosting websites.

All things considered, it comes down to the forum owners choice. My recommendation would be to go with either SMF or phpBB. Although, it does take a bit more work to customize and maintain, it won’t drain your finances and you would have some extra money in your budget.

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There are many ways to promote your forum and each might work different for everyone. You also need to watch how you use the promotion techniques. I am only going to list ten ways but I am sure that each will pay off.

1. The first and most important thing to do when promoting a forum is to know who your target audience is

2. Another very important technique would be Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I will be talking about this in a later post but I will touch lightly on it right now. If you optimize your forum with the proper keywords and description then it could rank well in search engines.

3. Submit your forum to various directories and search engines, this should bring in members who most likely enjoy your forums topic.

4. Place the Url of your forum into your signature at other forums.

5. Join post exchange sites such as forumgrowers.com. I will post a full list on a later date.

6. Off-line advertising, if you have enough money to run an ad in the local newspaper or if you have time to print up flyer, do it!

7. Social bookmarking: great for blogs and great for forums as well! If there are posts on your forum that you think would pull people in then use digg, stumbleupon and any other social bookmarking sites you may use.

8. Online advertising, if you know Google Adwords, it could be very helpful. But you don’t have to, more and more people are turning to alternatives such as Project Wonderful. With PW, you get to choose which sites to show your ad on. You can also sell advertising using Project Wonderful.

9. Leave comments on blogs, with your forums url on the Url section that most blogs have.

10. Never send out an email to people you don’t know asking them to join your forum. That will just turn them off and give your forum a bad name.

Popularity: 50% [?]

I have had this blog running for a while but have been terrible at updating it, which I apologize for. This blog is mainly just the front page for the forum so that is the reason this page is so rarely updated.

I figured people wouldn’t want to go to the forums if the blog is rarely updated so I have decided to make at least one post a week. Let me know in a comment which articles you would like to see. I plan to write about marketing and promoting your forum and other related articles

That is all I have time for right now, but things have come up in my personal life in a way that I will now be able to promote and focus on this blog with a lot of my time.

Popularity: 48% [?]

As you can see here, I use a blog. But I do most of my advising and help giving in the forums. However, most people came through from here.

My question to you all is, do you think that blogs make great forum promotion tool? If you have a domain and are running your forum on the main page, do you have a blog included?

Most forum owners never even think about blogs, but they can be useful. Many people enjoy reading other peoples blogs, and who knows? Your blog could hold all the important information such as articles that would normally make a very long forum post. Since your into growing your forum, and not a blog, you could just update it only once a week, unlike that way most people update 3 times a week.

Well I must be going, see you all next week!

Popularity: 48% [?]