In The Beginning… (Tip 1) Posted December 15th, 2005 in In The Beginning

I have decided after receiving many communications from people just starting a forum or soon to start building one, that I need to begin to elaborate on my bag of tricks and tips for a brand new forum. Today I will begin with discussing the most basic aspect of a new forum and I don’t mean the forum software!

Before doing anything you must first determine what the forum will be about. In doing this you first should look within yourself. What do you enjoy? What are you knowledgeable about? What do you feel you can talk about for the next 2-5 years and have it not get old or aggravating?

Once you feel you have several items you “could” talk about and enjoy doing so, you now need to determine if a forum covering those topics will be useful. If you know all there is to know about the Dell Optiplex line of computers, great! That doesn’t mean delloptiplexforum.com (no, I don’t have this domain registered ) is going to be a winning ticket. It must be a broad enough term that doesn’t limit your niche to 54 people. Also, in terms of a forum being useful, do you feel the forum topic would provide solid and helpful information as the content grows? This is very important. At this point in “forum time” a forum of people talking about nothing (off-topic or extremely general discussions) will likely lead to nothing.

Now that you feel you have a useful topic that has a large enough market, we must determine what there is in terms of competition. I will tell you now, that there is likely a forum already out there for 90% of the ideas you have. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing! I sat down one day and thought of nearly 50 topics that were what most would call niche markets. Out of the 50 topics, only two or three I found had no forum competition. This was just a test for me months back, which today helps provide you with some useful information. I would go to the “Big 3″ search engines of Google, Yahoo, and MSN and begin searching for your topic in a forum format. Search for “topic forum” or “topic message board” or “topic discussion”. I normally go about 3 pages deep and feel confident I have covered enough territory in my hunt for potential competitors.

Now that you have found some competition which is likely the case, take a close look at their forum stats and activity. Look at their search engine rankings and link popularity, using tools such as MarketLeap. If you feel you can provide a better forum in terms of content, rankings, and design then you have an excellent chance for success. If you see a competitor that is established, don’t necessarily run away. Think about the market size and determine what you can do that the competition isn’t doing. Can you do something better than they are currently doing? Is there another creative angle within the niche you can target? Take time to ask questions and then find your answers. Do not jump in to creating a forum that will take many days and weeks of your life to develop. Think first and then act!

I hope today’s “In The Beginning” tip was useful! Until next time…