I’ve been a member or moderator on many internet forums. I’ve recently started up a few writing forums and learned some lessons about what makes a forum successful. They are a great way to generate massive amounts of content, and if you can create an active and engaging forum on your site that’s relevant to your site, it means a following that can help you establish authority in your niche, a steady stream of traffic, and good SEO.
My favourite forum software is phpBB 3.0.10. Not only is it free and open source, it’s arguably the most versatile forum software out there. There are countless plugins for karma, SEO, social media, and just about anything else you can imagine doing with a forum. There are limitless skins to choose from, and it’s easy to easy to create something highly customized to your needs.
You can easily download the latest version of phpBB and install it on your server or hosting provider. You can also sign up for a pre-installed forum hosting service like prophpbb.com. The disadvantage to a pre-installed hosting service is that you can’t add your own plug-ins and such, and to stay with the free plan you have to go with a subdomain (like forumname.prophpbb.com). It’s still great software, and prophpbb.com is a good servic. But it doesn’t have all of the functionality forum users usually like to have.
For our new writing forum, we decided to go with Proboards for its sheer simplicity. It has most of the features that forum users usually want, and it’s fairly easy to set up a respectable looking skin and attract members. It’s not phpBB, but it’s the best we could find in terms of free forum hosting. We’ve been growing by about 2 members per day by using social media and social bookmarking. Now we’ve set up a YouTube channel to promote the site, and this seems to be a very effective tool as well.
There seems to be a snowball effect. Every member brings two or three more members, and each spreads good word of mouth about the forum. We make sure to post lots of quality content on the site, and we encourage other members to do the same. By creating something of value, and letting everyone see some of that value, we seem to fill a need for them. I’m looking forward to watching the forum grow and tracking my successes in promoting it.
