Starting Your Own Forum
by Michal Jajko
A free web forum is an online gathering of people who meet to discuss things and share their experiences. Out of the various Internet tools, it is one of the most effective ways of attracting visitors to your site.
It helps you by not only attracting visitors to your site but also by encouraging them to come again and again to share their own experiences and gain knowledge. However, it is not easy to incorporate a free forum on your site. It requires a lot of time, plus, you must have a great deal of patience and enthusiasm.
If you want to know more and create your own forum, you must visit http://makeforum.org/home.php.
You must know that it is meaningless to add new forums in your site with no members and no posts. It will not work in a vacuum. So, the million-dollar question is: how to attract members and posts? The catch word is content. You can attract visitors and lure them to become members only if you post quality content. The better the quality of content you have, the more visitors will gravitate towards it. Also, provide a feedback link to the visitors to get regular updates from them and know their views.
You can offer special advertising options and other incentives to active members who frequent the forum. Many forums lure members through text links or banners. Then they prompt them to start their own discussions chains to avail of the free advertising options. Many others hold a lucky draw to pep up regular users.
Everyday, there are new forums coming up on the Internet. You can work with them to source content for your website forum. It will be a give and take affair. For example, you cannot just take content from them. You need to post in theirs too. If you are cash rich, then you can invite people to start discussions on your forum by luring them with cash incentives. Here you would need to do a thorough quality check in terms of the content. In addition, you must ensure that the visitors are not doing a copy paste from other forums.
If you do not have a huge budget or if you find that you cannot attract people to start discussion on your forum in anyway, the last option for you is to 'clone' yourself and start various threads of discussions yourself. Once you do this, the other visitors will get out of the 'somebody -needs-to start-a-discussion-first syndrome'.
Now that you have been successful in attracting a bunch of new visitors to your forum, you can quietly exit and let the community grow by itself. The toughest part of building an online community is the initial warm up stage. Once that is done, your free forum will grow and flourish on its own. Maybe you would need to prod it at times.
Author Michal Jajko is the creator and administrator of the free forum site makeforum.org. A knowlegeable website designer, he also provides free forum hosting. You are welcome to reprint this article - but get your own unique content version here.
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