How to Build a Successful Forum

After several years of managing an active forum, I have picked the skills needed to make a forum successful. I sure made lots of mistakes starting out; they have however helped me and my forum grow. Here are tips on how to make your forum successful and grow your audience, registrations and number of posts in a day.

Content is always King

I know most of you think that just because forums are user content generation sites, you don’t have to post yourself. When starting out, you are going to find that you may be the only user. Create as much content as you can. You can encourage your friends to help you in building the content. Alternatively, hire a freelancer to create content for you. Never go for cheap posts because they are of no use.

The end user of your forum determines whether your forum picks up or not. Unless they love what they are reading, there will be no need register or join the conversation. Little forums attract lots of spam because spammers know if you are too lazy to create content, chances are that you won’t delete a spammy post that ranks and brings some decent traffic.  Never encourage spammers because they only attract others of their kind.

Never go paid to post offers because they don’t work. Unless you are paying somebody to create a quality post, eschew. Poor posts don’t rank and you won’t get traffic. They are of no use to the end user so nobody will want to register and improve on the post or ask a question. Chances are that the guy you paid $1 to make 50 posts used an automated bot. If the search engines include you into ‘spammy sites category’ you might never recover or even get decent users who post and ask questions.

Join other forums and contribute

Your signature link can bring you tons of traffic. Here is an example of why content is King.  If you post a quality 500+ words article in a forum that gets decent ranking with search engines, your article will be indexed and ranked. Chances are that it will gets lots of views not just from search engines but the forum users too. Chances are that some guy will follow your argument and will join your forum. You get lots of users this way and improve the number of registrations.

Promote your forum on blogs, Web 2.0 and Social media

Whoever told you that forum Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O) is a myth lied to you. Your forum will never rank or get traffic if you can’t be found by the search engines. You will always need links to rank. Quality links. The good thing about creating content for the web is that you find launching websites easy. You can get links in minutes. Exposure gets you more links. Natural links made by people other than you. The more your content gets linked to, liked by real users, shared on twitter, the easier it ranks with the search engines. Aim at getting lots of active users by converting your traffic and see how forum S.E.O becomes easy with little on your parts.

Pretty Urls

Pretty urls may not work for forums. Since a lot of the content is generated by users, you will even find that the title may not always be well suited for your forum let alone keywords in urls. It is always a good idea to let Google and other search engines find out what the whole discussion is all about.

Social Media is where things go viral

If you want to get thousands of users in days or insane traffic, try social media. While it takes months or years to rank with search engines, you can go viral on Facebook or Twitter. Some people call it trending. There are thousands of videos on YouTube and countless how to articles on social media marketing. Once you get it, you will find that people who contribute to your page on Facebook or retweet are more likely to post on your forum too. 

Cool giveaways and prizes create a buzz encouraging registrations

Everybody loves freebies. A helpful pdf can help somebody a lot. Most grateful readers register at your forum to say thanks, link to your forum and spread the word. Free PDFs, eBooks get shared a lot. If you have links in your book pointing to your site, you can get lots of new users from people who ready your free books.

You can even give prizes like free hosting, free domains, cash etc. More people are likely to share or tell a free cool deal to a friend.

All the best in building a successful forum. Remember while it may time some time to grow, once it picks up you stand to gain a lot.

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