Making Your Own Forum

In my previous article I talked about how to start up a website of your own. We talked about obtaining your own domain name and sorting out your hosting. These are the basics you will need to understand this article.

So what is a forum? Well if you are an Internet user you will certainly have come across forums. They are basically where a group of people post information on a bulletin board and other people respond. This can be anything from a general ‘chat about anything’ forum or a specific niche topic.

There are forums out there that get thousands of visits every day. Once you have users then they generate fresh content every day and the search engines love it. Just think – If you have 10,000 visits a day with an advert paying $4 per 1000 impressions then owning a forum can be very profitable.

It is extremely easy to quickly get a forum up and running. You may think you will need amazing knowledge of websites to get one going. This in fact not true at all. There are forum scripts that you can download for free and have up and running in minutes with only very basic computer knowledge. You can easily customise the forum to make it your own and easily delete/edit any posts that you do not want.

Great – So what’s the catch? An income of $1200 per month doing very little – why isn’t everyone doing this – surely it is too good to be true?

Well the catch is, quite simply, that it is extremely difficult to get a forum up and running. It requires a lot of time and dedication and realistically you would be very lucky to manage to get this number of users every day. Why is this?

It’s the catch 22 situation. To entice people into conversation there needs to be some form of conversations in the first place or there will be nothing to discuss. To have conversation there in the first place you need to have conversation there so it becomes a never ending loop unless someone intervenes.

Now ok, you could do some of this yourself but you need a lot of topics, a lot of different views and a lot of time to make it look like a natural growth and entice real visitors to read and contribute.

There are options if you have money. People don’t mind posting if they are going to get paid. It is common in some forums for people to offer this forum posting service. Generally the average rate at the moment is $0.10 per post. Now as you can imagine you get a lot of people just posting rubbish that is not relative to your topic and certainly not of interest to your web surfer looking for information. This way your forum will not grow.

The only way to make a successful forum in my mind is to be lucky, work extremely hard and be prepared to wait years for results.