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!

Tags: development, forum topic, niche, starting a forum

MFBG (Part 1): Choosing the right CMS

Choosing your CMS (Content Management System).

Remember to Subscribe to my Blog for automatic updates on part 2 and other parts of my exclusive forum building guide.

The first stone you should step is selecting a forum software/provider which suits you most and also provides a quality service. Are you looking for a paid or free software/provider? The list below are my recommendations.

Paid Forum Softwares: (Expensive)

• vBulletin
• Invision Power Board

Free Forum Providers:

• PHPBB
• Zetaboards
• ProBoards
• SMF

Depending on your financial budget, i would steer you towards the free forum providers because the price tag attached to vB and IPB is quite high.

vBulletin and Invision Power Board are quite expensive but depending on how far you want to take your forum, it may be a great investment. The developers of both softwares have put together great modifications and SEO-related mods which improve your search engine rankings, this results in improved and maximized traffic towards your board.

But it seems vBulletin + vBSEO combined is best for Search Engine Optimization. Why? because it has the most sophistacted setup, and also provides an extensive SEO admin panel which gives the admin the ability to customize any configuration.

I don’t guarantee a boost in traffic if your considering purchasing vBulletin + vBSEO because developing a forum has a lot more to do than configuring meta tags, optimizing anchor text etc. Such as personal advertisement, which is briefly covered in my Don’t sit back and watch TV on your backside! article and the hardwork and intangible aspects of a community.

Can’t afford the softwares stated above? We will need to turn to Zetaboard, ProBoard, SMF or PHPBB.

Pre-Hosted Forum Providers:

For the less experienced forum owners, i would highly recommend Zetaboard or Proboards. Both are pre-hosted and all you need to do is to fill out a registration form which requests the board name, admin account details etc. The process of registering a board takes less than a minute!

• Zetaboard Registration Page
• ProBoards Registration Page

If you would like to see a live-demo of the forums they provide, visit their support forum.
The links below are resource forums dedicated to the forum providers i mentioned above.

ZetaBoard Resource Forums:

• Official Zetaboard Support Forum
• IFSZ (Zetaboard Resource Forum)
• Outline (Zetaboard Resource Forum)
• Forum Boost (Zetaboard Resource Forum)

ProBoard Resource Forums:

• ProVision (ProBoards Resource Forum)

From my experience, Zetaboard has a vast amount of custom modifications, skins and graphics which allows the enhancement of your forum.

Self-Hosted Forums:

For the more experienced forum owners, who have their own personal hosting allowance, domain etc. I would recommend the following self-hosted forum software. PHPBB3 or Simple Machines are both highly customizable, through its coding and designing aspect. Theres also an extremely vast amount of modifications (add-ons) for both softwares which can be found at their support forums.

• Download PHPBB3
• Download SMF 1.1.5

Here are some useful links which i gathered to save you some time, they provide themes, skins, graphics and other resources for your PHPBB3 or SMF 1.1.5 forum.

SMF 1.1.5 Resource Forums/Websites:

• Paddex
  
• SMF Mod Site
  
• SMF Themes

PHPBB3 Resource Forums/Websites:

• Official PHPBB3 Mod Database
• Official PHPBB3 Styles Database
• PHPBB3 Styles
• PHPBB3 Modifications
  

I hope the first part of my exclusive Forum Building Guide has assisted you in finding the most suitable CMS for your future community. Part 2 covers how to narrow your forum topic into a niche, which will maximize your forum success.

Good Luck!
And feel free to leave your comments, i will do my best to respond to all inputs.

© MESKOS Forum Development Blog 2008
Reading Your Way to Success.
Building a Successful Forum.

Tags: forum building guide, start a forum from scratch

Stop Forum Spam!

Stop Forum Spam!

I found a website which provides you a list of common forum spammers. You can stop forum spamming by banning their IP’s, emails or usernames.

Visit Stop Forum Spam.

Hope you find this useful.

© MESKOS Forum Development Blog 2008
Reading Your Way to Success.
Building a Successful Forum.

Tags: forum, spam

Do you make these common forum mistakes?

Building an online community is hard work. For a forum to be successful it needs quality content, dedicated members and daily interaction. All these necessities are linked (triggered by a chain reaction). Put it this way, without quality content, there will be no dedicated members. Without dedicated members, there will be no interaction. As simple as that.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: common, forum, mistakes

Why making Forums Private is a Bad Idea.

Private forums take place on every forum online. They are most common in hiding staff rooms, so administrators and moderators can have exclusive (behind the scene) discussions about the forum, without members peering and leaking out information. This is how it should be.

Some forum owners, hide all their forums from visitors and only allow access to them when a member registers (or has an activated account). The only types of forums which should have their whole forum private are, family forums, personal forums, business forums etc. Why? Because they are not trying to gain public members but rather contact their clients/friends. If you are trying to gain members for your community, and your target is forum growth, your forum should be public.

Here are 3 reasons on how privatising your forum will affect your forum success.

If i can’t see what i’m joining for, why should i bother?

Some people decide to turn their forums on private to maximize registration rates. Example: they will want to register, so that they can see what the community is like. But generally, this stratergy will backfire and result in the total opposite.

Members usually decide to register because they see the content or a discussion which they want to reply to (interact with). So remember, keep your forum opened to the public. Allow them to read your discussions, if they think its worth it, then you have scored a new dedicated member. But if you force visitors to register just to view those discussions, more than likely, they will turn away and never return.

Hiding something from us? I’ll pass.

To some visitors, the reason why forums are set to private is because of illegal activity (trading music, copyrighted programs, softwares etc) or other activities which they don’t want the public to see. Especially those music and movie forums which require registering before gaining access to visit the forums.

This is another reason why setting forums to private may affect your forum growth. It will impact on your registration rate as members don’t wish to take any risk in joining the forum because they ‘assume’ there might be suspicious activity going on behind the scene which in most cases isn’t true. The bottom line is, visitors may have misinterpretations on your forum.

Search Engines can’t Index you!

For any community that is really looking to grow, this is reason enough. Search Engines provide large amounts of traffic for forums. Turn your forum public so it allows search engines to view your content and also index it into their search engine.

Every topic made on your forum is a potential advertiser. If your forum is set to public, each topic is indexed within a search engine. (Eg. Google). For example: If you made a topic about ‘Photo Effect Tutorial(s)’ and someone searched those keywords in Google, they may hit your result and view your forum. Depending on the quality of your content and if they like what they see, you may have scored a new member. Just remember, let those search engine spiders crawl your forum and not close the door on them.

If search engines can’t index your content, you are cutting off a potentially big source of traffic and limiting yourself in a truly unnecessary way.

Just remember, there are many negatives towards turning your forum private. It affects your registration rates significantly, is that what your aiming to do?

© MESKOS Forum Development Blog 2008
Reading Your Way to Success.
Building a Successful Forum.

Tags: forums, private, successful forum