You can start an online discussion forum. You can use it as a way to add another cool feature to your website to promote it. Also, you can start a forum as your main website.
The hardest part of starting a forum is getting membership and participation. You have to deal with the catch-22: People do not want to join a forum without much activity, but you cannot get much activity until people join. The best way to get around this is to post on your forum a lot yourself and to ask friends and family to participate on your forum as well.
Once you get some participation going, promote your forum as much as you can. Do not take it too slowly because then the forum will never get off its feet. You need to aggressively promote the forum so that you get a reliable community and constant activity.
PPC will work but it is very expensive. Forums tend to have very low click-through-rates on ads, so it is hard to make back a lot of the money you spend on advertising.
Eventually, if you are successful, a forum will gain a life of its own. It will begin to promote itself. It will be constant source of fresh user-generated content. Volunteer moderators will do a lot of the administrative work for you. It can be really great if it works out.
What do you think?
March 12th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
forums are definitely a good for promoting things and have quite the potential. i dont know of any fast way to get a good forum going, they just take time and patience and will eventually go where you want them to go. i remember back in the day when i was a computer gamer and had a lot of questions about items and tips, i would go to a sight called http://www.expectnothing.com. it used to be only a handful of people but now has grown substantially in the last couple of years.
~mike