How To Make A Website Forum
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David
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February 20th, 2012
Making a website forum is a fantastic idea to drive traffic to your website. Your website becomes a destination page meaning that people will visit it often to gather information. This also helps because you build credibility with your audience.
There are quite a few different options for making a website forum. Many of the options are free while other options come with a fee but it allows you to customize the forum a lot better. I'll cover quite a few of these options below.
What Is An Online Forum?
An online forum is a web based community of users where they can gather to discuss any topic that you can think of. Forums grow as the community of users grow and add content to the forum.
This is generally accomplished by subscribing to a forum and from there they can research topics, as questions or simply reply to another person's question. They are a great way to build credibility by focusing your forum on a topic specifically related to your website.
Online Forum Software
Online forum programs really come in two flavors, vBulletin and phpBB. The webmaster forum that I've made uses vBulletin.
vBulletin is often used to manage larger forums. It has many features that allow you to manage a forum with little technical experience. It's also extremely customizable so getting it to fit the feel of your website isn't difficult.
phpBB is a popular free and open-source forum application that comes free with majority of the free web hosting companies out there. The great thing is that if your web hosting provider offers phpBB you can often times install it with the click of a mouse.
The forum software that would work well for you really depends on what your intentions are for the forum. If you plan on having a large community with thousands of users vBulletin will probably be your best bet.
Now, if you're simply wanting a small forum for your informational or small business website, phpBB will work perfectly. Did I mention that phpBB is free? Once you've decided on which board works best it's time to start getting people to post & view your forum as a weekly or daily stop.
Getting Traffic To Your Forum
By now you obviously have an idea on the topic that you'd like to run a forum on. Now it's time to start thinking about how you're going to get people to visit. I've listed 4 ideas below which hopefully will get you thinking outside the box.
Offer an incentive for new users or a certain post - If you have some sort of incentive like a gift certificate for the 100th new user or 1000th post it may keep people coming back.
Promote - If you send emails regularly make a mention of it in your signature. If you have a newsletter make sure that it gets a dedicated area in your newsletter.
Start a few discussions to peek interest - If people see that there are already posts in the forum it's more likely that they'll look into the posts. If it's empty they're just going to leave.
KEEP THE SPAMMERS OUT - I used capitalization on this because it's important. You'll find that spammers love to fill your boards with advertisement for casinos, Viagra, etc. If you're going to start a forum make sure that you give it the attention that it's going to require. You'll need to log in regularly to delete all of the spam in your forum.
You'll find that the admin control panel has some great tools for keeping spammers out but they're persistent so stay on top of them.
Free Forum Providers
As I mentioned, most hosting providers offer phpBB free with all of their hosting plans. If you take a look at SiteToad.com under their hosting category you'll find that they offer phpBB with all of their hosting plans.
Another provider that I would recommend looking into is PowWeb.com. They are an extremely reputable company that is well know in the web hosting industry for their fantastic support and reliability.
Webmaster Forum
I invite you to visit my webmaster forum, it's a great place to discuss websites and ask questions to fellow webmasters regarding topics that you may still have questions on.