10 Strategies For Building a Healthy Forum

When it comes to building a forum, it really can add a whole new element to your online marketing efforts. No longer are you dealing with a site that users simply come to when they're seeking information. Suddenly you have a site where those same users can interact. You have a community of people where visitors can join up, ask questions, get involved, and along with it you can take advantage of many new aspects of marketing.

At least, that is what you would like to have. Before you ever get to that point, you need to build the community!

For many websites, this single (very intimidating) element is the reason that they never work to build a forum. It isn't the idea of managing a forum that they find intimidating; often you can find volunteers to help in that area. But getting the community to a healthy, active, point where your forums aren't always empty is the main problem for many new forum administrators.

To help you out, we have developed this guide to building a healthy forum.

Community Building Tips - 10 Ideas

Building a community isn't really difficult. All that is required is some work, and the right ideas to get things started. You'll have to do the work yourself, but we can give you 10 ideas that can help get you started.

1. Spend some time with community: Before you ever start your forums you should spend some time on other, similar, forums. This will allow you to get a feel for the pulse of the community surrounding your topic/products/services/etc.

2. Choose the right tools: Forums are all about allowing your users to communicate. You don't need the latest in interactivity; in fact they may make community building more difficult. Instead choose popular forum software that also has an email feature to keep members involved. A few forums that are easy to start with include: phpBB, vBulletin, or Invision Power Board.

3. Create an identity of your own: Your forum should clearly identify you. A catchy logo, a unique design, a catchy tagline, and anything else that makes your forum different will help get more members. Don't just install phpbb and leave it at that. Making your forum unique and identifiable is important to showing members what you have to offer.

4. Have a strong and compelling purpose: Another important element is having a clearly identifiable purpose. Is your forum just for supporting a product or service, or are you building an open community? Do you cater to a certain interest group, age group, etc? Know exactly what your purpose and communicate it clearly on your site. Too many communities fail because they never had a real purpose.

5. Seed your site with your ideal users: When you're just starting out, find your ideal users and invite them to join. If you already sell a product or service, you'll likely find these people in your current customer base. If you're just starting out, try making some friends on similar communities and get them to help you build your new site.

6. Offer incentives to join: One great way to get members to join up at first is to offer something for free. A special report, a whitepaper, or a short eBook, are a few ideas. Some businesses offer special discounts for new forum members.

7. Hold contests/promotions to raise interest: As you begin to get more people to your forum. Hold a contest or special promotion to reward your member for referring new members. This can get your entire member base actively involved.

8. Be involved and stay involved: Always get involved with your community. You are the representative of your site to your member base. Staying involved is very important to creating a healthy forum.

9. Moderate your forums religiously: One of the most important parts of maintaining a healthy community is forum moderation. Ensure that you, or one of your moderators, are always on top of things keep the peace, and keep conversation running smoothly.

10. Monitor your forums health: The final tip to ensure your forums continue to grow and stay active is simply keeping track of the current state of things. Tool's like those provide by BoardsMD (http://www.boardsmd.com) can be invaluable in seeing where you're at, and improving from there.

With these ten ideas you will have a good start to building your forums. Community building really doesn't have to be rocket science. Just put in the time to do it right and you'll soon have your own healthy, active, forum!