Hi,

I have recently started a business information and community site for where I live the North East of England. I have a forum on the site.

I want the forum to fill up with messages although it just doesn’t seem to be happening, do you think it is worth paying someone to post messages? The site is very segmented towards north east businesses so it’s hard to attract users to the forum. Do you have any advice?

After the weekend, I have many new mailbag questions that need to be attended to. I wanted to begin with one I feel is a common problem with many forum owners. I hear from many small / new forum owners that are having the hardest time getting traffic and activity to their board. Let’s take a closer look at this issue and determine what can be done.

First, I feel this is an unecessary problem for many forum owners. I believe that before ever putting a forum, you should first take a very close look at the market to determine if the forum is even needed, if it will be useful, and if it is marketable. If the answer is an astounding no to those questions, then it is time to rethink what you are doing. I would say you might even go as far as scratching the idea and starting over from scratch, this time spending a good deal of time planning in preparation for the future community.

That being said, I feel that ultra niche communities do have a chance to succeed depending on the niche. In the case of your forum where the topic is general business discussion pertaining to a small area of the world, it seems clear to me that in order to succeed you will very likely have to have a clever “offline” marketing plan in place. This may not be what you are looking for and more expense than you care to handle, and if that is the case than you may want to concentrate on being an information portal and not an online community. If you do have the budget to proceed with marketing your new forum, then approaching businesses with an offline strategy will be best. I feel you could spend hours and many dollars pursuing growth online with little to no results in this situation.

I wish you the very best!

Hi Lee. For the admin who is trying to make revenue from ads for the first time, what advice and tips do you have for them? Do you recomend any particular Ad Networks? How will they know which ads suit their community, or where to get the right ads from?

The two main pieces of advice I always offer up in response to this question are test, test, test and take your time. In the beginning, you will need to do a fair amount of research depending on your niche and traffic level. I normally won’t even begin monetizing my traffic until I reach 500-1,000 visitors on a daily basis.

One of the easiest things to begin to play with is Google’s Adsense program. Anyone can get approved for the most part, and it will give you opportunity to familiarize yourself with the different ad sizes, understand where you can place ads on your forum, and it will give you a huge testing playground. I recommend this as the place to start for the beginner. Get comfortable with copying and pasting that ad code in the appropriate places, test for the best ad sizes in different locations on the forum, work with the colors a bit and blending the ads in to the forum, and so on. Once you get your feet wet here, there are many more options such as CPM networks, CPA networks, going after private advertisers and link sales, and so on.

Not every forum owner can turn to the top tier CPM networks for example, as many of them don’t care to work with forums. I know that Burst Media, Casale Media, and Tribal Fusion do work with forums however, but you will need some decent traffic to approach them with your forum. Burst Media is the easiest of the 3 mentioned above to get in to. Depending on your niche, you may not even want to turn to a top tier CPM network, and thus you will need to research your industry to find out if their is an industry specific ad network out there that will better suit your needs.

In the end no matter what you try, chalk it all up to a learning experience and have fun with it. There is so much to take in dring the early days of experimentation, so do take your time.

This may have already been asked and answered, but I was wondering how much of a role you play in the day to day management of your forums.

I try to keep a good consistent level of involvement on my forums. It is a must that I do so as an admin. I posted last week a few thoughts about how I feel administrators should be involved, but I will happily expand on my role here today.

Depending on the forum, my role really varies. Due to the fact that I am basically a business guy without experience in web design, coding, or other various technical tasks, I mainly focus on what I am good at. That is managing the community, monetization, and growing the community. I made the decision long ago, that it would cost me valuable time and money to try to learn those things I wasn’t good at. It was a much smarter decision for me to hire that work out or find talent within the community.

I like to think of my role in any given community as a humble overseer of sorts. I am there at any time for the staff or membership to come to with issues. I am available for many hours each week through instant messenger and I am open with my contact information to both staff and members alike. I will post daily (weekdays) on every forum I own, and like to make a minimum of 3-5 posts on each forum daily. This lets the staff and members know that I am around throughout the day, reading up and checking on things. Aside from the “seen” activity, much of my time is spent behind scenes working with designers, coders, ad networks, partners, and so forth.

I hope this has shed some valuable insight in to my workload. I definitely have to be smart about things, or I would quickly get overwhelmed with my daily tasks.

Here is an interesting thread: What kind of admin are you?

Hi Lee. I believe i have found a hole which a great forum could could fill and prosper from. After extensive research and some feedback from fellow net users/admins i am convinced 90% that this could be a great investment. Anyhow my question is – how much should i invest? Is there a mark where i’d have invested too much or too little? I’ll need a vB license, good hosting, custom (top of the range) skin and some money for promotions. What would you limit this to?

This is a fantastic question and it highlights another one of the reasons I love this business so much! Anyone can start there forum on the right foot for less than $500-$1,000. What other legitimate business can you start with that level of investment?

One of things that must be looked at here, is what amount of funds do you realistically have available. Obviously an owned vBulletin license is going to cost you $160. There is no reason to purchase a leased license unless that is all you can afford. The domain will cost you no more than $9.00. A good shared hosting account will cost you between $5.00 and $10.00 a month with no setup fees. So you have less than $200 cost in getting your forum online with a stock look.

Now when it comes to design, I am picky and like to go with a custom look as often as possible. I have seen a completely custom design that is coded cost anywhere from $150 – $1,000. I think you can get a good solid design for somewhere between $250-$500. If we take the amount of $400 for your complete design installed, your expenses still total less than $600.

Obviously we haven’t touched on budgeting for advertising, but you didn’t mention that in your email. It is definitely something to keep in mind though so you can have an initial push of incoming traffic. This expense can range from nothing to thousands as well. I hope this helped you to define your initial investment and I wish you much success with your venture!

I have a forum and I’ve been working hard marketing. I’ve done paid posting, done few advertising on other websites, and also google adwords.

Nothing seems to be working the way I want it to and I was wondering if you have any suggestions promoting this website because I think it was a big potential and could eventually monetize the site.

Thanks in advance and you’ve been a great inspiration to me.

Today I am answering another mailbag question from a reader of this blog. Traffic must come first and I think we all have a sense of that. Monetization can wait. I normally won’t even begin monetization of a site or forum until I have at least 500 unique visits coming in daily. Traffic and creating activity on your forum is going to be winning solution. I want to reference a recent post answering the question of how to get members as I feel it offers multiple solutions to grow your forum in the early stages without costing you a penny.

We all know that forum building is hard work. You must make certain decisions before ever even starting your forum like, “Am I willing to work hard long term to make this a success?” or “Is this a niche that needs another forum?” I think with hard work and creativity you can build a successful community. The particular community we are discussing here today has to do with college discussions. I would brainstorm and look for any way to reach college students through link exchanges, college chat rooms, hooking up with fraternities to promote the site through word-of-mouth, and so on. There is no doubt plenty of room for growth in the college sector. Best wishes.