Every day many webmasters think of starting a forum and making it their business. Unfortunately, research shows that approximately 15% of the forums that start every month are actually able to reach an honorable stage of getting new registrations and posts daily. Being part of that 15% that succeeds is hard work, and this is why starting a forum is a decision that should be very well thought out and strong.

There are many major steps that forum starters have to  make sure they take so that they can succeed, which means getting at least 5 new registrations, 50 new posts, and at least 10 people online at the same time daily. Important steps include choosing the forum software and theme, finding reliable hosting, marketing, getting the team, posting, and optimizing & developing.

Forum Software

There are many forum scripts you can use to start up, ranging from free to costly, and in a multitude of varieties as well. Below is a list of some common forum software and scripts that people use. The best place to go to compare all the different types of forum softwares is ForumMatrix.

vBulletin — www.vbulletin.com — vBulletin is a professional, affordable community forum solution. Thousands of clients, including many industry leading blue chip companies, have chosen vBulletin - It’s the ideal choice for any size of community. Making your site a hub for information and discussion encourages visitors to return again and again. It’s also a highly effective way of improving your service to customers or users of your website. Our dedicated development team constantly strives to keep vBulletin at the forefront of new Internet innovations, while always keeping an eye on security and performance.

Vanilla — http://www.getvanilla.com — Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible discussion forum for the web. Anyone who has web-space that meets the requirements can download and use Vanilla for free!

AEF — http://www.anelectron.com — The full name of AEF is Advanced Electron Forum. This bulletin board software is free software. It is written in PHP and MySQL.  AEF has a very simple and easy to use Administration Panel and installing this software is a piece of cake! You can install new themes, customize themes the way you want. The User Control Panel has a simple yet beautiful interface where users can set their preferences for the board.

SMF — http://www.simplemachines.org — Simple Machines Forum — SMF in short — is a free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes. Its powerful custom made template engine puts you in full control of the lay-out of your message board and with our unique SSI - or Server Side Includes - function you can let your forum and your website interact with each other.

Visit ForumMatrix for more information on the many other forum softwares out there.

Reliable Hosting

Forums require a lot of disk space, as more and more people postyour server will use up more disk space and bandwidth. Forums need to be up as often as possible, because you have hoards of other forums that your traffic can move onto if you aren’t available often enough for all the posters. Make sure that you are buying hosting from a professional hosting company. For a beginner forum, I would suggest a VPS server. As your forum becomes more populated  and you start experiencing larger post volumes daily, upgrade your hosting. You want to keep downtime to a minimum, otherwise, you’ll lose a lot of the traffic you have to other forums.

Marketing

This is the most essential part of making your forum successful. I give credit to WebCosmoForums.com owner Manik for having let me get the chance of experiencing these marketing techniques in action with him, thank you Manik.

Once you have your forum up and running, start populating it with threads by posting by yourself. In the meantime, also go to a webmaster forum like DigitalPoint and make a thread saying you want to hire forum psoters and that you will pay them 10 cents per post, that is the usual amount. Pick up at least 5 people to post, and pay them after every 50 posts. Once you know that they are good posters and that they are diligent with their work, come up with some long term plans with them if they are interested.

As time passes, you will get to know them better and hopefully they will grow to like the forum a lot. As they are posting, you have to work on getting traffic. For help, ask them to place a link to the forum in their signatures on any other forums they post on. This will be great marketing for your forum! All you have to do is come up with some monthly plan with them, in which you will pay them a set monthly amount for posting at least 5 times daily on whatever forum they will market for you in.

You should market your forum on multiple webmaster forums, such as V7N, DigitalPoint, WebCosmoForums, and SitePoint. You yourself should use a key point of marketing a forum; contests. Hold a contest in your forum every two or three weeks, in which the person to make the most posts would win, and you can have multiple winners. If you market this contest on multiple webmaster forums, you’re bound to get tons of new registrations. In addition, people will post a lot too, so you’re getting tons of bonuses, and its only costing you a little bit of money every month to pay the contest winners and the people helping you market you forum.

As you get more posters due to the contests, make some of your hired posters into simple posters who will post for contests now, not for hired payments. And then, start promoting them to moderator status.

You now have a marketing and forum team, as well as a successful forum in which people are posting for contest money. Once you know that your forum is famous enough to get its own members and to get people to post on their own will and for their own needs, you can stop holding contests. It’s recommended that the contests be held for at least 6 to 8 months. Once you have steady pace of posts and registrations coming along, you can now continue marketing around other places, maybe even use AdWords.

Consider buying banner ad spots and 25×25 ad spots on blogs as well, these things will really help a lot with exposure of your forum. Once you have everything done, continue to work with the forum and its members. Good luck!