A forum can be a valuable addition to your website, especially if the website deals with commercial processes that needs continuous customer feedback. Such websites require an active presence of their members and a forum caters to this need. Besides, a well-maintained forum can guarantee you continuous traffic and regular sales.

Forum management requires continuous and dedicated maintenance at the server-administration level and on the front-end level. However, the success of a forum on the front-end is more theoretical than technical. Given below are factors that determine success of a forum.

Authorization

When creating a forum, you should hire a team of experts and entertainers to run the show. Experts are needed to drive debate and discussion, usually by creating new topics the whole time. At the same time, an entertainer can lighten up an argument or intentionally goof or add sarcasm to amuse members. Lets face it, no user would like to remain in a continuous pensive mood and an entertainer can keep the posts coming.

Simultaneously, you need to achieve top spots on search engines by generating links to your forum. Try to add a minimum of one backlink every day, which would lead you to creating a lot of affiliates, in the bargain.

Design Layout and Content

For new visitors, the design and layout of a forum are very important. It is the first impression a user would have of your forum and you should try and capitalize on this. At the same time, you shouldn't go overboard with the design aspect and hire graphic designers for this process. Keep the design simple; remember not all your visitors browse your forum through a high-end computer. A complex design with intricate, beautiful skins may only result in errors in uploading your forum pages and sometimes may not install on a clients computer.

The layout feature is more complex and involves continuous research and upgrading. The idea is, you should learn and adapt to the needs of your customers. A customers ‘need' is a necessary and sufficient condition to add amenities to a forum. The demand of customer is different and may vary from time to time.

Don't begin by creating sub forums and multiple threads, at the management level it could result in huge losses and you may just not have enough workforce to moderate these sub-forms. Sometimes your sub-forums could include demented members creating spam posts to draw your attention and if their actions are not monitored quickly, it could lead to a crash of your forum server.
Also, you may realize that members would not like to move from one forum. You can improve on activity and participation by creating on five interesting threads next to each other in one forum

A successful forum would always offer the right content that makes their forum unique and inaccessible to new users on the website. Good content can work wonders on a novice user. By stating novice, we are discussing about someone who has never had a first-hand experience of a forum. For such users, threads with a simple and a familiar theme appeal more than the regular bulletin board. For such users, creating threads with simple posts should do the job."