Have you ever wanted to start your own community forum? It can be a great addition to your site which also can bring revenue to your pockets. It is however, a full time task to get your forum off the ground. Like any business many forums fail and are deleted to the digital dust pile of the internet. So how do you have a successful forum? Creating a successful forum you will need the proper niche, marketing, and pre-launch tactics.



What is your website about? Is the subject of your site a growing niche? How saturated is your niche? These are questions you should ask yourself before embarking on creating a profitable community. Forums need hundreds of active members to be successful. Your forum could have a thousand members but only 10 active members. Active members will be the driving force of your forum, yet it is up to you to find interesting topics. A topic could be a major search term in the search engines and could drive traffic to your websites. So picking the proper terms is imperative to the growth of your niche forum.

Marketing is very important to the viability of your site. If your forum isn't in the top ten for your niche it will grow very slowly. You should build back links to your forum and ask members to link to your sites. Most of you members are members of myspace, face book, and social bookmark sites. Asking them to link to your site could raise your page rank on your forum, thus allow your threads more visibility. Doing this will help the indexing process, by allowing bots for search engine to index your new threads quickly. Although those tips are great you still will need to do basic seo. Publish at least two article about your niche and submit them to articles to article submission sites. Submit an exciting press release describing your forum and things that you will display to your users. With most forum software you can find a seo mod to make your urls search engine friendly, get it and use it. Don't forget to social bookmark your site this is important to bring in new users too.

Before your forum becomes discovered, you can get your forum to grow by using unique tactics. Using a posting service is a great way to boost your forum. Paying for 1000 or 5000 post will allow your forum to look alive before real visitors arrive. Most people don't like to join forums with nopost. Some will join but will neglect to post. The small cost of a posting service is well worth doing to get your forum off the ground. Finding the most search terms in your niche is another way to drive laser targeted traffic to your new forum. Make up a few members and talk back and forward to yourself, let them have unique personalities. You can phase out those members when new real members join. Remember to start threads based on search terms that are sought at least 5 times a day.

Forums are a great way to add that little something that every site is missing. Using these techiques can bring members and wealth to your website.