07
Before You Begin
Posted by admin | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on 07-02-2008
There are some things that you should know before starting a forum. As with most things in life and especially in the online world, there are some things that you should think about before investing your time and money.. I will go through specific requirements for each forum in my forum software articles, but for now I will just go through the basic stuff you should know and think about.
Before you start up a forum you should ask yourself the following questions:
What will my forum be about?
Make sure that it is about something you care and know a lot about. Visitors are not going to want to stick around if they feel that you don’t know anything about the topics at hand. If you have a topic that is too broad or if there is no main topic at all, visitors are likely to pass it by.
Is it in a saturated market?
If the market niche that you are looking into is saturated that means that it has been done a ton of times before and visitors will most likely leave because they already know of popular forums and websites of the same topic. A couple of examples of saturated market niches are search engine optimization, and other webmaster type of topics.
Is there potential for visitors?
Again, if the market is too saturated visitors are likely to just pass through. If the topic is a growing market that is not saturated but is growing popular, then visitors are more likely to stick around.
How much money am I willing to invest?
You should think about a budget for your forum as well. You will need to plan out how much money you are willing to shell out. If you want to use Vbulletin, it will cost a lot of money. There is also your advertising and marketing strategies to think about. There are many paid posting services that can help give the appearance of a active community but usually the best ones are pricey.
If adding a forum to your website that already exists, ask yourself-do you get enough traffic per day?
If it is low, don’t fret-you could probably build up traffic for both parts at the same time. Market your forum and website together and you will achieve readers for your website and members for your forum.
After you have thought about all this and are set to go, read through my forum comparison article and after you have decided which one to go with, read my Starting Up Your Forum article.
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