Creating new forums the easy way

One of the biggest headaches in starting up a new forum is developing content and activity.

The simple truth being that people are less likely to join and contribute to an empty and inactive forum.

So the first challenge is to create plenty of discussions worth joining in with.

For a user by themselves, and even with a couple of friends, this can be a challenge - starting it is one thing, maintaining momentum over a long period is another.

Something I’ve done recently to address this is to buy up a couple of small forums.

However, I didn’t buy these forums simply to develop them as they were - but instead to split up into niche topic areas.

Two of my best purchases were a general gadgets forum, and a computing forum. In total they cost $800 for both and had a total post count of around 3,500 between them .

They were then merged into a single main technology forum - Tech Watch.

I then copied the database over to 4 other domains, installed one on a vbulletin, and 3 others on SMF - then removed the topics inappropriate to that individual board.

You can see two of them here:

Pro Home Digital
Pro Mobile Talk

The third SMF is a video games forum I’ve not finished setting up, and te vbulletin is a general computer hardware forum that should hopefully be completed tomorrow.

In all three instances, they look like separate and unrelated forums - the topics have been split across into clearly defined niche areas.

And although the search engine benefits of duplicate content are questionable, for once, I’m not concerned with the search engines - the aim is to create small forums that look appealing for *human users* to join.

Certainly there’s work to be done - the forums still look small - but at least they look a lot more friendly then a completely empty forum.

And it will provide suitable material for forum posting services to work with and develop, to to help start initial momentum - I’ve already taken on forum posting services for Tech Watch, and will commission some for Pro Mobile Talk and Pro Home Digital.

Not only will that help create activity and momentum to capture new members with, it’ll also dilute the impact of having set up duplicate content - as older threads are revisited and added to, and newer discussions are started.

Of course, finding a suitable forum to purchase, let alone split up, is a challenge in itself. Frankly, there’s a lot of complete sh!te for sale, with small forum owners pricing on expectation.

For example, a number of forum owners advertising on DigitalPoint or SitePoint have almost no posts, almost no members, and almost no traffic - yet the forum owners think they can demand a few hundred dollars.

My ideal is forums with around 500-2000 posts of actual content - ie, not built up using low-quality paid forum posting services - because you have real content you can work with, which can additionally capture search engine traffic to attract new members.

And that’s the key to developing momentum in the first place.

Recently my chronicles-network forum passed 200,000 posts and 4,000 members. Considering that the forum is only 3 years old, and isn’t attached to a major brand name or offer free tools, I think it’s quite an achievement.

And the reason it is was that I pushed it from the beginning - developing content, generating discussions, and pushing on the SEO.

The internet is an online community in itself and people love to talk, But if you want them to talk and discuss and debate on your forums, you will probably need to put the extra effort into creating a full and active home for them in the first place.