The Business of Forums

Many sites today use web forums and many others are looking into starting one. Forums can make a great addition to a website. By providing that sense of community, your site gets a new level of stickiness. Once you get the forums off the ground, they will be a source of continual repeat traffic. But, there are some things to consider when looking at starting forums on your website. And if you are looking to start a site which is 100% forums, you need to pay special attention to these considerations.

The Software

This is the easy part. There are a lot of pre-written forum software packages out there which are quite good. My personal favorite is vBulletin. The software sells for $159, which compared to some of the others is expensive (especially considering that many of them are free). However, the software is rock solid and very powerful. If you are serious about starting forums which are going to be more than a simple hobby, I would seriously recommend checking out vBulletin. Some of the popular alternatives are PHPBB and Invision Power Board but you can also head over to Hotscripts and check out a long list of them written in PHP.

Whatever you do, use a package which uses a database. Some are written to use files to store their data and it can be a total nightmare and is usually pretty slow (especially on searches).

Getting Them Started

This is a constant subject of discussion on webmaster forums – how to get your forums started. Forums do not grow quickly until they have reached a kind of critical mass. The problem is that forums which look dead are not interesting to anybody. Any new forum is going to look dead because there is no discussion. The first members might sign up, but if they have nobody to talk to, they’re going to take off. So, how do you get your forums started?

Well, if your site already has good traffic before you add the forums, then your job may be easier. By simply routing your existing traffic into the forums, you can hopefully get the boards to get some active discussion going and it will take off from there. But, a very popular technique is to fake some conversation. There are two ways of going about this. You can either register several different usernames on your forums and then go and have mock conversations with yourself. Visitors to the boards will see members talking about interesting things, but they will not know it is all you pretending to be several people. Another way of doing it is to actually pay people to start up conversations on the forums. You will find people asking for such services on webmaster forums and even over at eLance.com. By paying people to go and post, you will get real live conversation on the forums. Over a little time, people will begin to register on their own and begin talking. Once the flow of real traffic picks up, you can drop off the paid posters and the board will continue to grow on its own.

Managing the Forums

Forums can take some real work to keep up with. You are dealing with a lot of people with different personalities, and sometimes they will get involved with things you do not want. My suggestion is to create a series of rules for your boards, post them in an obvious location, and then enforce them. How you structure the rules of your forums is up to you and depends on the purpose of your forums. Some forums enforce a family friendly environment and work to keep everything on topic. Other forums allow vulgarity and are pretty loose about topics.

To start off, you will likely be managing your forums yourself. This entails checking in on the forums on a daily basis, answering questions to avoid dead threads, and banning members which are there for trouble. You will find that forums will, from time to time, attract those looking to cause trouble or those looking to post some spam and leave. You will need to devise your own policies on how you deal with this stuff. Eventually, you will want to appoint some faithful members of your forums to act as moderators, allowing you to back off. On our large forums at PC Mechanic, the boards grew quickly to a point where I could not manage it myself. So, several years ago I appointed some members to act as moderators. Today, the forum has a staff of moderators with a forum administrator managing the whole thing. We have a private staff forum where we discuss happenings, vote on banning members, discuss rules, appoint new moderators as need, etc.

Making Money With Forums

You can make money with your forums, however doing so is usually different than with a normal content-based site. First of all, you need to have very active boards before anybody will be willing to advertise on it. Secondly, you will find that most ad networks do not deal with forums. Now, if your site is mostly a content site, you can still get into ad networks and then also run their ad code in your forums (as long as it is not against their policy to do so). Some popular forums can actually sell direct advertising in the forums. Usually, advertising in the forums is done for branding purposes. Forums usually have a much higher than average page view per unique visitor ratio, so advertisers are not as interested usually. They might pay for 50,000 impressions, but only reach 1,000 people because most people will come to forums and click around for awhile. However, forums give an opportunity for branding. By putting an ad in front of members repeatedly, that product of service is going to be known to them. They will be aware of the brand. In that way, you can market your forums to advertisers. But, again, it takes a lot of traffic to make this work.

A common way to make money with forums is Google Adsense. Another method is to use a contextual keyword advertising medium like IntelliTXT which will highlight words in the forums and hyperlink them to advertisers.

Should I Start Forums?

Not every site is suitable for forums. If your site is basically there to sell things, you may not want to post forums. Inactive forums do not look good for a site which is trying to sell a product, because dead boards tell the potential customer that nobody is looking at your product (or that’s what they will think). You can use forums for the purposes of support, but you could still have the same problem. In this case, it may be best to wait until you have a very large customer base before using forums. Or put them into a members area which is password protected.

Content based websites usually can benefit from forums. They are a traffic magnet once they are set up fully. It can be easy traffic that is self sustaining. Any serious web publisher should probably have at least one well-known and trafficked forum site.