| Money Management
Guide
Online Income toward Financial Freedom |
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8 Tips for
starting and Maintaining a successful Online Forum
This business principle of continued contact and business relationship building has given rise to the popularity of online business forums, and of course, "theme-related" online forums. Online forums quickly establish empathy, set forum owners up as "experts" in the eyes of visitors, and serve as a promotional vehicle for other products and services that forum owners seek to sell.
While online forums are
popular and the perfect method of relationship building, starting a forum and
maintaining one can be challenging, especially in the beginning when members
can be "few" and "far between". The challenge for most new
forum owners is to get beyond the initial start up phase and move onto a phase
where the forum members themselves promote the forum simply by posting. Although each forum is
individual and personal, a few general guidelines should be followed or at
least kept in mind when starting and maintaining an online forum. These are as
follows: 1. Take care when
choosing the type of forum and forum script or software that will be used. The
forum should be easy to access, easy to use, and come with "visitor-
friendly" features. All visitors should be made to feel welcomed and find
the navigability of the forum, user friendly. Forum scripts and software,
especially "free" varieties, may be overburdened with ads from the
parent company and lead to a poor experience for visitors. Some recommendations: http://www.phpbb.com/ 2. The forum should have
a good number of interesting and focused topics. The content should reflect
the interests of the target audience, and every care should be made to have
well-written and informative content that is updated regularly. This not only
helps attract new members, it keeps older members from losing interest and
defecting to other forums. 3. The forum should be
Search Engine friendly. High activity forums, like popular blogs, provide a
great reason for Search Engines to visit them frequently as they are brimming
with fresh content all the while. Dynamic urls, session ids, etc. used by most
forum software can be very detrimental to the forum health from Search Engine
point of view. When selecting a forum
software, check if they are Search Engine friendly. Open source software like
phpbb, have mods (modifications) developed by third party sources, to enhance
the forum in many ways. Here's a great mod for
phpbb to make it Search Engine friendly: 4. The forum needs to
have a clear list of rules, a disclaimer, and most of all, good solid
moderation. Visitors will quickly become frustrated with forums that have no
clear guidelines, or feature rude, obnoxious, or overbearing members. Good
manners are required as much online as offline. 5. Promotion, especially
in the early days, will take considerable time and effort. Forums can be
difficult to start (members generally are "shy" when there are only
a few present), and the more posts that take place, the more individuals will
join. This is a "snowball" effect of forums, so marketing must be
done consistently, day in and day out, until the forum becomes more
self-sustaining. 6. The owner of the
forum should take an active interest in the forum and SHOW this interest by
contributing regularly. Above all else, people join forums where they feel
they will learn from the owner of the forum, and if the owner is never
present, they quickly lose interest in the forum. 7. The forum should be
targeted, yet diverse, encouraging older members to contribute, without making
newer members feel uncomfortable. Cliques can form in forums, and this type of
behavior should be discouraged by the owner and moderators. Every effort
should be made to answer questions or comments by all members as quickly and
thoroughly as possible. 8. As with all other
Internet related ventures, care needs to be given as to hosting and
maintenance of the forum. A forum that is always experiencing
"downtime", will lose members quickly, and a forum that has many
coding mistakes will quickly frustrate visitors. As with Web sites,
"cheap" providers of hosting and maintenance are not always
"better". All in all, online
forums can be a great way to generate income, develop a good reputation among
clients, and provide entertainment and instruction for many individuals. Like
with everything else, however, they take marketing savvy, and a great deal of
time and attention to detail. The old saying, "You only reap what you
sow" really applies to the world of online forums. ---------------------- Vishal P. Rao is the
editor of Home
Based Business Opportunities - A website dedicated to opportunities, ideas
and resources for starting a home based business. He also runs the Work
at Home Forum - an online community of folks who work at home.
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