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8 Tips for Starting and Maintaining a Successful 
Online Forum, By Vishal P. Rao


Nothing promotes a business online better than staying in
touch with prospects. The more interactive the continued
contact, the more of a relationship that is built with a
potential client.

This business principle of continued contact and business
relationship building has given rise to the popularity of
online business forums, and of course, "theme-related"
online forums. Online forums quickly establish empathy, set
forum owners up as "experts" in the eyes of visitors, and
serve as a promotional vehicle for other products and
services that forum owners seek to sell.

While online forums are popular and the perfect method of
relationship building, starting a forum and maintaining one
can be challenging, especially in the beginning when members
can be "few" and "far between". The challenge for most new
forum owners is to get beyond the initial start up phase and
move onto a phase where the forum members themselves promote
the forum simply by posting.

Although each forum is individual and personal, a few
general guidelines should be followed or at least kept in
mind when starting and maintaining an online forum. These
are as follows:

1. Take care when choosing the type of forum and forum
script or software that will be used. The forum should be 
easy to access, easy to use, and come with "visitor-
friendly" features. All visitors should be made to feel 
welcome and find the navigability of the forum, user- 
friendly. Forum scripts and software, especially "free" 
varieties, may be overburdened with ads from the parent 
company and lead to a poor experience for visitors.

Some recommendations:

http://www.phpbb.com/
http://www.vbulletin.com/

2. The forum should have a good number of interesting and
focused topics. The content should reflect the interests of
the target audience, and every care should be made to have
well-written and informative content that is updated
regularly. This not only helps attract new members, it keeps
older members from losing interest and defecting to other
forums.

3. The forum should be Search Engine friendly. High activity
forums, like popular blogs, provide a great reason for 
Search Engines to visit them frequently as they are brimming
with fresh content all the time. Dynamic urls, session ids,
etc. used by most forum software can be very detrimental to 
the forum health from Search Engine point of view.

When selecting forum software, check if they are Search 
Engine friendly. Open source software like phpbb, have mods 
(modifications) developed by third party sources, to enhance
the forum in many ways.

Here's a great mod for phpbb to make it Search Engine friendly:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/about15132.html

4. The forum needs to have a clear list of rules, a
disclaimer, and most of all, good solid moderation. Visitors
will quickly become frustrated with forums that have no 
clear guidelines, or feature rude, obnoxious, or overbearing
members. Good manners are required as much online as 
offline.

5. Promotion, especially in the early days, will take
considerable time and effort. Forums can be difficult to
start (members generally are "shy" when there are only a few
present), and the more posts that take place, the more
individuals will join. This is a "snowball" effect of 
forums, so marketing must be done consistently, day in and
day out, until the forum becomes more self-sustaining.

6. The owner of the forum should take an active interest in 
the forum and SHOW this interest by contributing regularly. 
Above all else, people join forums where they feel they will 
learn from the owner of the forum, and if the owner is never
present, they quickly lose interest in the forum.

7. The forum should be targeted, yet diverse, encouraging 
older members to contribute, without making newer members 
feel uncomfortable. Cliques can form in forums, and this 
type of behavior should be discouraged by the owner and 
moderators. Every effort should be made to answer questions 
or comments by all members as quickly and thoroughly as 
possible.

8. As with all other Internet related ventures, care needs 
to be given as to hosting and maintenance of the forum. A 
forum that is always experiencing "downtime", will lose 
members quickly, and a forum that has many coding mistakes 
will quickly frustrate visitors. As with Web sites, "cheap" 
providers of hosting and maintenance are not always 
"better".

All in all, online forums can be a great way to generate
income, develop a good reputation among clients, and provide
entertainment and instruction for many individuals. Like
with everything else, however, they take marketing savvy, 
and a great deal of time and attention to detail. The old 
saying, "You only reap what you sow" really applies to
the world of online forums.

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Vishal P. Rao is the editor of 
http://www.home-based-business-opportunities.com - A website
dedicated to opportunities, ideas and resources for starting
a home based business. He is also the owner of the 
http://www.work-at-home-forum.com - an online community of 
folks who work at home.
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