Tips For Forum Owners

[Jani]

These tips are based on my personal experience.

1. Don't announce your forum until it is 100% ready, incomplete categories, 404 pages and spelling mistakes make the first impression very bad.

2. Don't announce your forum on other forums wherein you have -50 posts at least, you should have good no. of posts so that people can trust you and should give your forum a look, otherwise they will treat you as spammer.

3. You shouldn't wait for others to come and put content in there, in the initial stage of your forum you will have to put the content yourself.

4. Don't make posts like "How old are you", "How many forums do you use"....etc, forums are already filled with such questions, you need to post informative content because if people don't join or post in your forum they should come back to read a new and informative post.

5. Be patient. Forums are really not easy to make famous but it is also not impossible, if you put quality content you should see the results in a few months.

6. Do not post your content on other forums, this way when users come to your forum they will find a new information which they have not read on other forums. Some of them will copy-paste it on other forum and few of them will give you a link back too.

7. Do not try to popular your forum overnight, it doesn't work like that. You need to wait and keep the forum grow on its own.

Hope these tips will be useful for you.

If you want to add any tip(s), you are welcome.

[Mr Justin]

Good list of tips Jani. I have fallen into the trap of some of these before and its not good. You should make this a sticky. Great info.

[Jani]

Don't worry Justin, it happens. We just need to learn things by our past experiences and should not repeat the same mistake again

[Jani]

I would add the 8th point in there,

8. Always close old threads. Sometimes spammers use old threads to put their links in.

[Rhiannon]

Thank you Jani, these are all terrific tips and I will definately take them all on board.

[SEOtips]

Great tips for all those running forums and trying to manage online communities.

[Jani]

9. Never have a BOSS-like attitude... be friend to your members.

Yes, you are the owner of the forum but your forum is nothing if there are no members. You need to develop a friend-like relation with your members. They will feel more comfortable

[globalspot]

I really like number 9. I had a forum and unfortunately, some of my moderators acted like they were gods, and soon the forum became dead.

[conorod]

I would agree with all the tips so far except for #8. I hate forums that lock threads or give you infractions for bumping them. If a user has valuable content to add to the thread they should be able to do so.

[Jani]

Originally Posted by conorod

I would agree with all the tips so far except for #8. I hate forums that lock threads or give you infractions for bumping them. If a user has valuable content to add to the thread they should be able to do so.

But why should the thread be opened when the matter has been solved?

And regarding bumping the threads, it is very rare that the thread starter bumps the thread just to share some good information because in 99% cases they bump the thread(s) just to get it UP in the list of threads.

But you have your own opinions and may be you get more success with it

[conorod]

I can see your point, but I was at another webmaster forum recently where 4 threads that I wanted to reply to were locked. As a user that turns me off the forum a bit.