How To Make A Website Forum
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How To Make A Website Forum
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 ForumBy 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
WebsiteSpot.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 ForumI 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. |
