Forums and Message Boards
Forums and message boards are found on many websites as a place for visitors to interact and communicate.
A forum is a place on the Internet that allows people to have an online conversation. They don't have to be online at the same time like you would in a chat room. Instead, forums allow one person to start a thread about a particular topic. Others who are interested in the topic may reply to the post or add some additional information. In this way an online discussion takes place even though all of the contributors are not online at the same time.
You can see an example of a forum that I am using on my Old Woodworking Tool Community & Forum.
Most forums and message boards make money from either advertising or through a subscription service to participate in the forum. Some forum owners place Google AdSense or other kinds or advertisements on their forums to generate revenue.
There are many forum products available and some may be included in the cost of your website depending on how you use for your web hosting service. You should check with your them to see what products they offer. The web hosts that offer a control panel that include Simple Scripts or Fantastico Deluxe usually offer several forum and message board options.
The various forum products available vary in the level of time it takes to manage and administer a forum so investigating the various forum features is important before choosing to use one on your website.
Bluehost.com offers several free options including phpBB, bbPress, SimpleMachinesForum and PunBB. Many of these are open source and can be automatically installed by using the C-Panel control panel.
Other Forums and Message Boards
If you want a more robust forum option or want more control over it, you may need to purchase a forum software program. That's what I did on my Old Woodworking Tool Community Forum. I set up a website at Bluehost.com with a separate domain name from my Old-Woodworking-Tools site. Then I set up a forum using vBulletin.
So to create my forum, I had to buy the vBulletin forum software script and install it on my hosting account at Bluehost.com. This requires that you learn about uploading files, FTP, and a little about file structure on your website.
I was actually able to install my forum and get it running in a couple of hours. The free forum scripts are not as feature rich and robust as vBulletin, but they can be a good option. I've used both types of forums, but my personal recommendation if you have the money, is to buy a program like vBulletin. Click here for an instant Community.
Getting Your Forum Noticed
To be successful with forums and message boards on your website requires a ton of traffic and that's not easy to achieve.
Unless you're already getting a lot of traffic to your site, it's hard to get enough people to use your forum so that it looks like there's enough interesting conversations there for someone to want to register.
On my site, I was getting over 500 people a day so I decided it was time to install the forum. It's a slow process though because the percentage of visitors to your website that want to create an account and participate in an online discussion may be quite small. Even with 500 to 1,000 unique visitors a day, the amount of forum traffic may be quite limited until there is a substantial amount of messages posted.
Most people who visit your forums and message boards will not become active members. That's why you need a really good traffic generating website in place before you add a forum. You NEED traffic to make a forum work. Don't try to create one until you have the traffic already coming to your website.
Once you have that traffic, however, a forum is a great way to get visitors contributing content to your website that you can then monetize.
Think about that for a minute. One of the most difficult and time consuming tasks for someone trying to create a money making website is the time it takes to create quality pages. With a forum or other mechanism that enables visitors to your website to create content for you is a huge advantage. Instead of having to create the content yourself, you can manage the content created by visitors to your website.
That's a great concept for webmasters to understand and leverage when they add features to their site. Managing the forum users takes a lot of time, however, so you'll want to way the costs vs. the added benefit to having a forum on your site.
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