MESKOS Forum Development Blog

MFBG (Part 2): Forum Topic and Niche Development

Welcome to Part 2 of my Forum Building Guide. In this guide, i will cover developing a forum topic and how to narrow it down into a niche for maximized success.

If you already have a forum topic idea, you can skip this section.

Alright, you’ve chosen your forum software and now its time to develop a forum topic which your board will be based around. Lets try to avoid the general chat forum ideas because the competition out there is amazingly high. Why not create a forum based on one of your hobbies or interests?

Many owners establish a forum for the sake of becoming an admin and the chance to execute power/roles of an administrator. This concept fails most of the time, why? because they lose interest in the board after a period of time.

How can i avoid this? Create a forum based on one of your hobbies or interests (as stated above). How does this maintain my interest? Usually forums based around your own hobbies will improve your activity and the amount of effort placed into the board because you can personally interact with the members and execute your knowledge into the discussions. If you don’t know much about a topic, how can you join the discussions? how will you maintain a life-time of topics to discuss about? etc.

So lets say one of your hobbies include Gaming. If you have a brief knowledge on most gaming consoles and a broad understanding on most games, thats a bonus! Depending on how well you manage your community, a gaming community can become an extremely and popular forum. We will use the concept of a Gaming forum and narrow it down into a Niche for maximized success.

We have a topic, now to narrow it down into a Niche. (Avoiding Generalization)

Many forums are not as successful as they should be because of their general discussions. Example: A board dedicated to Gaming. Yes, there are forums which are extremely active and all they discuss about is gaming but usually they have been established for many years and their member base is solid and quite confident.

For newly established forums, you should narrow your forum topic down into a more specific topic (Also known as a Niche). Here are some examples:

1. Gaming -> Gaming Hacks.
2. Gaming -> Specific Gaming Discussions (Eg. World of Warcraft).
3. Gaming -> RPG Gaming Discussions.
4. Gaming -> FPS Gaming Discussions.

See what i did? I narrowed the generalized topic of Gaming down into a specific target. How will this improve your forum success? When gamers search for keywords in Google and other search engines, such as: “Maplestory Hacks”, your forum will have those keywords highly concentrated as your whole forum is based around that topic. If your forum was opened for general gaming topics, the variety of keywords and discussions would be too broad and ‘less-concentrated’.

Also your forum will grab all gamers who are interested in cheating the system. Yes your targetted audience is limited but most registrations will be ‘quality’.

Expanding in the Future!

Say your forum has been established for a couple of months, the members are loving the niche gaming discussions and the forums are becoming cramped with topics, it means its time for expanding. Once you have the opportunity to expand, seize it!

Later on in my Forum Building Guide, I will go into further detail about Forum Expanding. In Part 3 of the guide, I will be covering, how to integrate your idea into your forum and explaining the importance of forum layouts.

As for now, I hope this guide has helped you in forum topic development and how to narrow it down into a Niche.

Once again, Good Luck!