How to start with new Forum or a Blog site

Creating a new discussion forum/blog looks lucrative to every one, the benefits being there is no scarcity of content for it until there are enough members to participate actively. Since the more specific answers were found on forums so there is shift of search engines results from web publication pages to discussion forums.

There is no headache of adding new article on your own once it boost up runs for over years without any assistance. Creating the forum for getting clicks on PPC ads can be great idea but you have to keep it secondary preference and try to become the authority on the topic, earning can be started at later stage. Sometimes such earning attempt gets failed due to non targeted traffic though the number of visitors is satisfying.

Competing between mushrooming forums sites

Easy and Free availability of PHP script have made forums creation job of hours this is what growing the number of peoples tempted to create such sites and hence the competition among them by distributing the online users, now you can expect success only if you create it on entirely different subject. And believe me if you do so success is one step ahead. For example if you want to start another web/design/seo/promotion forums without enough financial support your venture may doomed into failure, instead you can choose the topics like satellite channels discussion, cell phone price blog etc the way is much easier.

The forum can be created inside the subdirectory/subdomain as a separate section of your site like forum.nokia.com or purchase a new domain specially for forum, the later is recommended if you are serious.

The precious members of the forum

Forum has to be promoted by inviting the large number of people to become its member, moderator and administrator etc. in the beginning to promote the forums most of the message will be posted by its moderator and administrator group. Sometimes people post in their own forum with different user name or hire paid posters for initial take off.

You need to search for other people who may be willing to share some of their time with you to lure them you need to propose them premium membership like administrator and moderator and create an environment so that each member feels that they are integrated part of community and they have individual brand here. From some member of forum you may get some back links too.

To keep the member working on your forum you need to provide them features of better comfort and get rid of irritating ones. For example it must have auto login system to avoid logging each time. You can provide them wysiwyg editor with small toolbar. A quick reply box at the end is necessary. In the beginning to encourage users to post in your forum you can give them anonymous access which can be removed at later stage.

Designing and developing

Now come to the design and development part. Newly launched forum must be noticeably different from existing ones in layout and look, if you can create you own layout from scratch with personal touch and look that would be best to become respectable in the eyes of others webmasters, however creating a full featured secure forum is very difficult and time consuming task, and if you can’t then there are plenty of ready made free and paid software are available like bblog, vbulletin, invision etc.

Sometimes forums are subjected to kind of hacking with the loss of information in the database, these are mostly seen with free PHP scripts as many people use them and know their loop holes. For better security use software like; vbulletin by paying somewhere US $150. Looks and layout of these forums can be customized to fit you requirement by installing new themes or do small trick with the script.

Depending on the type of forum you have to keep a distance from graphic elements on you forum, for example if members are webmaster then they will only look for content and lots of GIF/Flash picture may drive them away.

SEO side of the forums

Its clear that many ready made forum software are highly search engine unfriendly because the software developer know little about search engine optimization. Page loads up slowly as everything is loaded from database. You can minimize these effect either by looking for forum software that automatically generate html page or do it manually. Look at the biggest webmaster forum webmasterworld.com which loads very fast almost like Google home page.

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