How To Start A Successful Forum Website

Posted in Websites on 16. Mar, 2009

Starting a forum website is basically about choosing a niche and promoting the crap out of it! You will need to figure out what type of forum you want to start, like I said, you will need to choose a niche, or a central theme for your website. For example, if you want to start a webmaster forum, your central theme can be as broad as just a general webmaster forum, or you can go deeper and start a webmaster forum that focuses on Search Engine Optimization techniques, software, firms, and tools! I know I am making it sound pretty easy, but there is a lot of work to do, but there is a method to this madness, and I am going to show you how.

Step 1: Register a Domain Name, Sign Up For Website Hosting, and Get a Good Forum Script.

First, you will want to find a domain name from your favorite domain registrar (Your Domain Registration Company Here), try to find a domain name with a keyword from your niche and then the keyword “forum” too. This will help SEO (Search Engine Optimize) the website very nicely! Next, you will want to get great website hosting, this is a very crucial step, I recommend using HostMonster.com. I can’t stress this enough, get good website hosting! There are so many websites that get mixed up with the wrong type of website hosting company and the company goes down the drain along with your money. Another scare that’s popping up is ‘fly-by-night’ website hosting companies; these companies are scams and just take your money and leave. This is why I use HostMonster.com they are a legal, registered company that has proven they are legitimate and are here to server you better than any other company I have used. Finally, get a good and free forum script, I recommend using PHPBB, it’s a great script and you can get it free and installed very easy using Fantastico DeLuxe from HostMonster.com’s cPanel!

Step 2: Promote Your Forum!

Promoting a forum can be a very difficult task, not only do you have to find people interested in talking about your niche, but you have to find a lot of them or else if a visitor posts a question and nobody is there to help him or her answer it then that visitor will just leave and never come back! This is why you as the webmaster must be extremely active in the forum for the first few months. This time is crucial! One of the most effective ways is to go to competing forums and pay some of the affiliates as little as $0.05 per post, to write content and post it on your forum, even if it’s just answering questions of other visitors or having a friendly conversation about your niche! This will help you promote your forums because the paid affiliates will be actively posting trying to earn as much money as you can meanwhile the visitors that you bring will feel like your forum is very active and they will feel more apt to stay and chat!

Step 3: Making Money, With Techniques to Expand.

In order to make some good money and expand your forum at the same time I strongly recommend making your forum a revenue sharing forum! Set up your forum so that a registered visitor can put in their Google Adsense ID and every time they start a thread their Google Adsense banner is put up on the thread and they will earn some money from posting on there! This is a great opportunity for you; this will promote more and more activity on your forum and encourage people to start posting like crazy so they can earn more money! And if you set it up so that their ad banner is shown only ½ the time then your banner is shown the other half then this will increase your income from the website dramatically!

And there you have it, a fool-proof three step program to starting your very own successful forum website! Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you stick around to read some more fantastic articles! Please subscribe to my RSS feed at the top right! It will notify you of any new articles to the website so you can keep up-to-date with all the new fantastic websites to make a fortune off of!

Thank you very much!

Sincerely Your

Internet Income Teacher

-Galen Schneider

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