How to Build a Forum That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Months Later, Part 2
In "How to Build a Forum That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Months Later, Part 1" I told you about setting up a blog (like WordPress) and promoting the heck out of it, getting focused REPEAT traffic before making things complicated with an actual message board. Now it's time to actually setup that message board.
If it were me, I would wait until you had about 10 comments within 1 day of making a new post without any sort of promotion. If you're ready to move to a forum, go ahead, BUT...
Do NOT setup a phpBB forum, at least not yet. I have seen people with tons of traffic and lists of millions of subscribers setup a phpBB forum from the get-go and have it fail. If a person comes to your forum and sees 25 subjects you're just going to confuse them.
You are going to go to a script directory like Hotscripts.com and find a simple message board in PHP. The simpler the better. I can't really recommend any specific one but you will want the following:
1.) When you first load the forum you should see a list of topics. No multiple forums.
2.) No threading. Threads are those things you see if someone posts a topic on "Birds" and someone else replies and it shows a new link, "Re: Birds" below it, someone else replies and their post is linked to as "Re: Re: Birds."
All the replies to a topic should be listed on the same page.
3.) This page should list ONLY each topic, the creator of that topic, the number of replies and POSSIBLY the date of the last post to that thread.
4.) User registration should not be required. When a person makes a post there will be a place to type in their name.
This is a great example of a very simple forum:
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel
When your forum is first launched you are going to have to do one heck of a job promoting it. I would get a lot of people lined up to start asking questions on your message board for that first week. Also remove the capability to leave comments on your blog and just have a link pointing to the forum that says: "Discuss this Article."
You don't even have to create a special post for that blog entry. Let people make their own feedback posts. BUT, if you want as many posts as possible go ahead and post that latest entry on the message board!
Now that you have a message board "for real" you should be trying to promote the heck out of it so it will reach critical mass. By critical mass I mean you need to accumulate people who will revisit the site every day or week to make posts or respond to them, without you having to do any work.
To get your site moving along to this goal send out mailings to that update list every once in a while when you see someone make a REALLY interesting post.
Or place AdSense ads on the site, and put 100% of the payout from that into buying traffic from exchanges to bring more visitors to your site.
Or use the AdSense money and go on eLance to hire writers, but with a twist: instead of paying for the service of having a series of articles or an ebook written, pay to have forum posts written. The service would be to have these freelancers sign up for an account on your site (under a pen name probably), do the proper research and then once a day or once a week post a hot question or a hot tip for that particular niche your message board covers.
You could even recycle your AdSense profits forever and simply use the site to recruit lots of affiliates on a moment's notice.
To create a kickass forum that stands on its own and keeps building free content and search engine food that YOU own, all you really need is a lot of good traffic. Repeat visitors who make good quality posts will keep your site fresh in the search engines, RSS feeds will get you lots of inbound links from other sites, and recycling your profits will keep the traffic steady until it takes off on its own. Good luck.
About the Author
Free (humorous) video for you about how to promote an affiliate program without seeming spammy using some PHP "computer voodoo."
Take a look: http://www.affiliatebattleplan.com/Rewrite.html