How to maintain a successful forum

[xXInfectedXx]

How to Create and Maintain a Successful Forum​

I will be talking you through some steps today on how to " Maintain a successful forum". If you follow these steps you will get loads of traffic. I can guarantee.

1) Create your forum. Try and make your idea unique to other forums. Forums can be created for free at http://www.prophpbb.com/ http://www.freeforums.org/

2) Look out for good and active people. Pick them to be a moderator on your forum. This will help keep spam and from people breaking the rules.

3). Make a few topics/posts yourself. People are sometimes scared to create topics/posts if no-one else has. So I recommend doing this

4). Use another forum/website to promote your forum. You could use Forum Promotion or another website to do this. This will help increase traffic

5). If you are having a forum, make the style look different and unique to everyone's forums. This will make your forum stand out from the crowd and people will like it.

 

[Belthazar]

I would agree with you, Infected. I think a nice theme and TLD are the 2 most important parts you did not list. People won't want to look at your forum if you have a horrible theme, so they won't post on it. A TLD is important for Professionalism. It's also easier to remember a .com name than a .zetaboards name.

 

[htb24]

If you have a good domain name, theme for your forum and management style you have a good basis for a forum. A lot of advertising is needed and SEO. You need to look for active members aswell as posts at the start. Once you have a good core of active members it gets easier to maintain a solid community.

 

[Shole]

You should erase the successful part out of the title. With this you start a forum, the rest is a lot more complicated than just gaining traffic from promotion forums. Indeed those are good tips but with that you won't get far. You need to add hard work and motivation, other means of promotion, forum design, domain and name, staff. There are a lot of things, but mostly it all comes down to hard work and dedication.

 

[reddyash]

Success always comes at the later stage. Once you have chosen your forum and added few threads to start a converation.
You will need to market your forum in other forums, try the post exchange and proper SEO is need. Once visitors start coming it's upto you to maintain the forum.

 

[Sharon]

I totally agree with #3 specifically. I think as an Administrator it is your job to provide quality content for your members. One should not become complacent and expect members to come up with their own topics. It's your community, bring it to life!

 

[David17k7]

Great instructions you have here. Thanks for posting!