A forum is a great way of discussing a topic that you are interested in and knowledgeable about with like minded people or of sharing your experiences and possibly helping beginners in the subject. A well run forum is a pleasure to visit – you feel welcomed and amongst friends.

Running a forum is more than just about letting every Tom, Dick and Harry join and then letting them dictate the ‘mood’ of the forum. It’s up to you, as the administrator, to set some ground rules and abide by them.

Firstly, you must manually activate every new member registration. Spammers are unfortunately attracted to forums like flies to honey, and even the newest forums will start getting a trickle of these every day. Although it’s tempting to allow these to join to up the membership levels to make it look like you’ve got an active forum, allowing these in will be a bad mistake. At the least you’ll be inundated with advertising, and at the worst some very unwelcome posts might be made. You, as the site owner, will be responsible for what’s on your forum. As you go through the registrations each day obvious spammers with made up email addresses or user names which are simply advertising products will be easy to spot. If you need to go further you can check on the IP address and where the person is coming from. If you’re still not sure, do a search at StopForumSpam – an excellent website that keeps up to date records of spammers, as these people try to join every forum going. You’ll soon become quite quick at spotting spammers against bonafide registrations.

You can’t start a forum and then lose interest in it. Unless you are working to activate registrations, moderate comments, administer the forum and contribute to discussions yourself it’s not going to get very far. Running a forum takes time every day.

You need to decide where the boundaries lie and the kind of behaviour you’ll tolerate. Some forums I have been on insist people search for answers already given to similar queries before posting a new question, and when a ‘newbie’ posts they get responses fired at them to search the forum for answers first. Or are you more tolerant, and encourage individual replies? It might take more time repeating the same information, but it does make the forum more personal. What happens when someone asks a daft question, and gets shot down rather rudely by another member? Do you tolerate that? Or do you try to set ground rules for how people should behave towards each other.

Sometimes this might depend on the audience for your subject matter. I run a specialist forum for keeping bearded dragons, and we’re likely to have older children joining as well as adults. Sometimes an incredible ignorance is shown about keeping these reptiles – people should have done their research before taking them on, and as such these poor creatures are now looking at short unhealthy lives unless their owners can be given correct advice on how to keep them. On another similar forum, new members asking stupid questions are shot down in flames, and they leave after making one post, and without gaining any help at all. On my forum I actively encourage all members to be welcomed, and their most basic questions answered so that they get the information they need to the benefit of them, and their pets.

Now this is obviously just an example, but do you want to help and encourage people? Or just have a membership of ‘experts’? That is a decision you need to make, as it’s you, and the moderators you might have to help you, who can influence this by the way in which your members respond to posts and also the way you moderate. Sometimes you need to PM posters who aren’t interacting in the way you want them to, and accept this might lead to losing a member, but if it helps for a better community overall, the loss of one might prevent all those ‘guests’ who visit before taking the plunge think twice before joining. It’s interesting, but I’ve only had one problem with a member in the 5 years I’ve been running the forum and had to ban them. Most members pick up the friendly culture of the forum very quickly.

When your forum starts to become very active you might find it is too much to moderate all the posts yourself. You will find regular posters are flattered if you ask them to become a moderator and help you run it. You should ensure that anyone you ask has views that do not diametrically oppose yours (although healthy debate should always be welcomed), and whose approach to answering posts is in line with the ‘feel’ you’ve developed for your forum. You might also want to appoint someone or more than one (depending on the size and activity on your forum) to be other administrators, particularly to help with the activation requests for new members. Sorting out 150+ spammers a day is better with help! I’m in the lucky position of having an administrator in Australia – from my point in the UK I do the day shift, and he does the night!

You may think you are very knowledgeable about your subject, but it’s great if you attract someone to join who’s known as an Expert in their area. I invited two such people from their contributions on other forums and their expert knowledge and experience has been a real boon to my forum.

If you allow people to sell items or services, you might want to think whether you’re going to let people join just for this purpose, or whether you want to restrict this service to contributing members. You might also want to restrict what they can offer. A good rule is that someone needs to make 10 posts before being able to put up information about what they want to sell.

Something that encourages people to post is always helpful in trying to get a lively forum. Assigning different ranks to people who post above a certain number of posts can encourage people to try to reach the next level. On my Bearded Dragon forum we go from Egg, through Hatching to Adult – obviously not appropriate to many forums, but you get the idea.

I found that forums don’t actually help you to make money – having Google ads on the forum did not bring me any revenue despite a high number of visitors to the extent that I abandoned them. People come to the forum for advice or to chat, not to click on adverts. Linking your response through to informative pages on your website is the best suggestion I can make, and of course, having a forum increases the number of visitors to your main site.

If you have a forum but it’s becoming less active, look at the tone of the posts and see if the feel of the forum has changed. Unless it was once more relevant that it is now (a forum about the London Olympics will be less topical in 2013!) you might want to try to make it more positive, friendly and welcoming to newcomers. This means posting a lot yourselves, and engaging the moderators in trying to turn round the feel of the forum. If a particular member is causing problems, then don’t feel bad if you need to ban them. It’s your forum after all, and it’s totally up to you who you allow on there. You need to make sure you and your moderators keep active and posting – people want to feel important, and like someone ‘official’ to respond to them.

Forums are a great addition to the internet – there’s one set up for almost every niche subject, and people enjoy using them to get information they need, or to share their knowledge. A well run forum is a pleasure to visit, just like going to your friendly local pub. But no one will want to put themselves in the firing line to get abuse from bullies. So it’s your job to keep them out.

Paying attention to your forum and keeping to these best practices will keep your forum active, friendly and attracting the right kind of visitors and new members.

It’s simple yet also deadly effective and hugely profitable. There are many advantages to creating information products. One crucial benefit is that info products are really easy and inexpensive to create.

Before being aware of these secrets, you have to know a little more about info products. These are products which provide individuals information, usually a solution to some sort of difficulty. A product can tell people how to train a dog, shed extra pounds, design a website, cure foul breath, meet members of the opposite sex, create shelves, apply cosmetics, or paint a portrait using oil paintings. An information product can be made in video form, like an ebook, or as an audio recording. Some kinds of info products lend themselves better to one form than another. For example if you are telling people how you can apply makeup you definitely need visuals, so a video might be best. An audio recording wouldn’t do the trick in this instance and an eBook might need to have a large amount of screenshots.

One of the biggest challenges brand new internet marketers deal with is picking what type of information product to create. Since you more than likely intend to make a profit off of this, you need to make an information product which solves a difficulty or shows people how to do something. Solving problems is profitable. Also, you need to make certain that there’s a considerable sized audience for this product, and you want to make sure that they’ve got cash to spend. You wouldn’t want to make an information product which fixes a very obscure problem that is only encountered by a small group of people. And you wouldn’t want to create an information product that attracts a crowd that has no money to spend, such as young teenagers or kids.

Here is a list of evergreen product ideas in which you will always locate a hungry crowd: Weight Loss, Canine training, Pet health, Acne remedies, Curing romantic problems, etc. Provide these individuals with a truly helpful answer to their particular problem and you’ll have a grateful crowd that will return again and again. You shouldn’t merely stick to those items. In case you have a skill and you may teach other people – for instance, putting on makeup or painting a portrait or arts and crafts or home maintenance – by all means make an information product around it.

Information product creation says that you need to make your information product stand out, so you would want to develop a method which lets individuals learn how to do something quickly and easily, and emphasize that whenever promoting your product. If you’re searching for ideas, try and identify what prospective customers need. You can do this by doing some basic Google searches and by visiting online forums or blogs which are geared to the area that you want to create a product for – dog training, weight loss, dating forums, and so on.

To engineer a successful forum, there are three key questions an administrator needs to ask before building the forum.

Goal #1. How will you gather a critical mass of members
Goal #2. What will compel members to provide content
Goal #3. How will the forum survive pass the first year
In this article we cover goal #1 – how to gather a critical mass of members.
Be niche

Your forum has to build a name for itself as the authority on a subject. All successful forums have something that sets them apart from the rest. For example, it could be the unique content of the site, an under-served niche demographic they target, or the personality of the site administrator.

If you’re creating a forum, ask yourself, “What will people get out of my forum that they can’t already get somewhere else?”

All successful forums have a purpose. They exist for a specific reason, to accomplish something. To connect people with common interests, or to facilitate conversation on issues related to the site.

One major reason many new forums fail is because there are too many forums on the same topic! Forums will not be successful if their sole purpose is building traffic for the main website.

Choice of forum software

Getting this right is critical. There is a high probability the existing forum posts will be lost by switching to different software later.

Consider search engine optimisation first. Since 85%+ of new traffic to your website will come from the search engines, having your discussion forum posts found by the search engines is essential.

Before you choose a discussion forum software package, make sure that all the posts within the forum can be found and ranked by the search engines. Most discussion forum software hide messages posts in such a way that they simply cannot be crawled by the search engines.

One way to find out if message posts within a specific forum software package are search engine optimised, is to visit a site using that software, copy a recent forum headline and paste it into Google and do a search (surround the search headline with quotes so Google knows exactly what to look for).

If the message headline comes up within the first 50 pages found by Google, you know the forum has been optimally indexed. If the headline doesn’t show, you might want to look for a different forum software package.

Most of the major forum scripts are geared for SEO, but there are ways to improve results further by adding search engine friendly URLs, or in the case of vBulletin, adding vBSEO (a full suite of SEO enhancements).

Dynamic URLs, session ids, etc. used by most forum software can be very detrimental to the forum health from search engine point of view.

Take care when choosing the type of forum and forum script or software that will be used. The forum should be easy to find and easy to use. Some forum scripts and software come with compulsory ads served from the parent company, and lead to a poor user experience.

Focus content and discussion

Users will sign up and post on your board if they find the existing content interesting, and consider it worthwhile to participate. Establish several interesting categories within your forum, without going overboard.

When launching the site you will not have many members, so keep the content focused on a few discussions only to avoid empty rooms. It is far better to have 4 active sections than 15 empty ones.

Don’t be afraid to lump similar topics together. Once a forum grows to a size where threads are pushed to page 2 and 3, then consider splitting a forum into two smaller ones.

Do not have too many off-topic discussion areas. Instead create one or two introductory discussions, where new users can post about themselves and existing users can welcome them.

Know that before making the forum public, it is a good idea to create maybe two or three threads in each forum area, so visitors will have somewhere to post. Many new forum users are too shy to post new threads on their own.

Function over form

Users care more about the content and community than the design. Image heavy sites have a high first impression, but subsequent low usability. Image rich sites take longer for each member to read threads, make a new post, move between forums etc. If the page refresh is slow, users post less and are less inclined to return. Google and Yahoo are not particularly attractive, but very successful search engines which observed the law of efficient page refresh.

Design should not be the focus, instead improve the user experience with clear and easy to use navigation, few fancy buttons and images and making sure everyone understands the functions of the site. There is no substitute for good form design, consistent branding, clear and readable type and ample white space.

Use hacks, add-ons and features sparingly

Many forum scripts have hundreds of freely available add-ons, for example, vBulletin, including social networking add-ons, live chat, shops and arcades.

The trick here is to employ fewer features, but do them well. Avoid making the mistake of adding so many features they become a visual barrier to new users, or slow existing users’ posting. Add too many features too quickly and you do not allow enough time to measure them, or allow your users to adopt them.

A simple, clean layout with features that promote registration, referral and posting are all that is required.

Super easy registration

Almost all forums have some barrier to entry, to screen out trolling and spam. However, a common mistake among forum administrators is making registration complex.

For example, some forums make you agree to rules, answer security questions, validate your identity via email and await moderator approval. While these measures counter spam, if your signup process is long and tedious, many users will give up. Try to achieve a good balance between security and ease of use.

Apart from making registration hassle-free, offer registrants some kind of benefit to join other than permission to post. These could be freebies or downloads.

Set your barriers to entry to be either large or small. Large will net you fewer members, but quality; small will gain you more users but of mixed quality.

Member referral schemes

Many forums fail due to a lack of publicity. Tell your friends to join, and if they find it interesting, they will tell their friends, who will in turn tell their friends etc. This can tie in very well with a referral scheme, whereby users are rewarded for referring other users to the board. Word-of-mouth advertising, in tandem with other forms of advertising e.g. SEO optimization, Google Ads, link trading with other forums, can result in a powerful combination which will draw more and more users to your forums.

Seeding links in other forums

Get people aware about your forum/site for free, simply by joining other forums and having your link in your forum/profile signature. Emailing sites such requests can attract negative publicity, as recipients may perceive you to desperate spammer.

The best technique is to join another forum. Have a link to your site in your signature, and try to make 10 or so posts each week. If you get a great reputation on the forum, people will check out your link. If you are a credible, it is likely people in those forums will join yours.

Useful forum articles

Forum design
Building content
Long term survival
Anthony Coundouris is a director and digital consultant for the digital marketing agency Firestarter.