There are several types of websites. The most common types of websites are content sites with no user visitor activity, blogs with some visitor activity and forums where visitors can become full members. While a blog offers your visitors the opportunity to post comments on articles and subscribe to articles/comments, a forum allows your visitors to become fully engaged in your site by building a profile and starting threads/articles. Adding a forum to your blog can really increase activity on your website thus earn you more cash.

I manage several communites using forum software. My largest community (Sports Card Forum) has had 28,000+ registered users and sees on avaerage 3,500 posts daily. The forum gets about 20-30 new members daily and is the largest community dedicated solely to sports cards. In this article I will give you some tips for starting and running an online community. I added a forum to my Zune Blog and it has had some great success.

When to start a forum

You should only add a forum to your website when you are confident in your traffic. I have seen hundreds of new forums start and remain a ghost town, eventually closing down due to low traffic. If your blog is getting a lot of traffic and your visitors are commenting a lot then it may be time to start a forum. If you plan on starting a forum from scratch as a new website then it is important to have a plan on gaining traffic.

Picking a Theme

The most important aspect of running a community is picking a niche that has not been over done. For instance, starting a forum dedicated to NFL football would not be a great idea since there are so many of them. Other the other side of the spectrum, starting a forum dedicated to s specific player may be too specific. They key is to find a niche that has not been overdone already, but is not too obscure.

Forum Software

I highly recommend using some of the existing forum software scripts out there vice paying a coder to build you a forum from scratch. You can buy proven software for a fraction of what a coder will charge you. While there are hundreds of programs I will only cover a few. I’m picking the ones that are scalable, used a lot and have dedicated coders that offer free ad ons. Here are my recommendations:

Premium Forum Software

• vBulletin - the most popular forum software and what I use for all of my forums. You can get an owned license for $160 or a leased license for $85. There is a large, dedicated community of coders that develop ad ons a vBulletin.org.
• Invision - Invision is another great software script, but in my opinion is second-tier to vBulletin. The standard license cost is $149.

Free Forum Software

• PHPBB - PHPBB is by far the most used, free forum software. It is great software for something that is free. Is has a great community of coders that write ad ons for free much like Vbulletin. A great script at no cost!
• Simple Machine Forums (SMF) - Many call this forum software a vBulletin kncok off. It is another great forum software script that is free.

Here is a basic checklist to starting a forum

1. Purchase the script and fill out your account information. Download the script to your computer.
2. If the forum is an addition to your website/blog create a folder titled “forum” or what ever you want to call it. Another example would be “community”. Read the install instructions. Upload the proper files to the folder.
3. Install the script and run through the set up procedures. You will need experience with setting up a database. If your skills around a server and/or database are lacking then pay the extra money to have the devloper install it for you.
4. Once your forum is live log into the administrator area and spend some quality time going through the options.
5. Spend time readin up on the COPPA requirements if you are going to allow kids under tha age of 13 years old as members.
6. Set up your forums. Do NOT create too many forums or your site will look like a ghost town. As your site grows you can ad sub-forums

That’s it! You will know have a forum that can grow into a huge community. Members will have their own accounts and can start or reply to discussion topics. In the future I will write up tips on managing your community. Here are some great communities that I run that should give you an idea of what a community is like.

• Sports Card Forum - large sports card community
• Trader Retreat - exclusive sports card community
• Zune Info Forum - Microsoft Zune community attached to my blog
• Korea Discussion Community - For English speakers living in South Korea

Other posts that you might find interesting:

• Being an Active Forum Member Helps A Lot!