If you’ve ever spent your time on a webmaster forum you’re sure to see a thread of a new member begging for help on how to grow his forum. If you’re lucky this is a small forum of 50 users running with their own domain name; but, you’ll often find that this spam filled phpBB forum with 4 legitimate users is just running on the sub domain of their friend’s servers. In the end the thread will never get any responses because forum marketing has become a dirty topic due the ‘paradox’ of starting new forums and an overcrowded market. Users only want to join a community which can give them something, so starting a forum from nothing is extremely challenging and will require you to find the users who will give you something (their time and experience) for nothing. To do this you have to set up your forum right, so let’s start out with the two most important discussions.

When you’re planning to market a forum

First you have to be sure that your forum is up to snuff, if you haven’t set it up right you’ll pay for it later once your forum has grown. Even if you have already started your forum on phpBB or with an online provider it’s always best to move on earlier rather than later. For example if you have started a forum and have 25 members and you have realized you want to switch to vBulletin, do it early and safe yourself hours of time. The ‘Impex’ module provided free with vBulletin allows you to import data from other forum software databases; however, it’s not perfect and there will likely be issues that you have to fix. If you do it with 25 members it might take you 30 minutes, but if you wait until you have 500 members your now in for 10 hours of repair if the same amount of problems exist per user.

Which software package to use

Now that you know it’s time to finalize your plans your first major decision is which software package to run. While phpBB [PHP Bulletin Board] and SMF [Simple Machines Forum] can be picked up for the perfect price of $0.00 they come with the effects of being open source: fewer features and reduced security. Due to the hordes of inexperienced webmasters running phpBB, most hackers know at least a few powerful exploits which can bring your forum down at any time. On the other side of the free pond, SMF generally has fewer, less damaging exploit, yet it also lacks templates and upgrades from the community.

If you head into the paid software market you’ll find vB [vBulletin] and IPB [Invision Power Board]. Both of these forums have more built in features, are more secure, and will reduce the amount of time required to spend to manage them. If you pick up either of these forums make sure you buy the “owned” license. Both software packages are slightly different, but since vBulletin has become the champ in the views of almost all webmasters we will focus on how their system works.

If you buy a lease you pay $85 and you can use the software for one year before it must be removed. If you realize your mistake within 30 days you can upgrade to the owned license for another $85, however that comes to $170 instead of $160 so you have spent $10 more for the same product. With the owned license you get the rights to use vBulletin on your server forever and you get free updates for one year. If you want updates after that you need only to pay $30 at which point you can get extra year of updates from your payment date.

Step two in setting up your forum

This step is finding, [purchasing], and installing your template of choice. A quick Google search for “‘your forum software’ skins” will provide you with several different sites selling skins. Free skins generally require a forum membership and a few posts while a paid skin will be $25-50 for the skin and one year of updates. Different sites have different policies on renewing so make sure that you have the money planned for this future expense. Expect to find a free skin if you went with a free forum and expect to buy a skin if you bought your forum software. Developers expect that if you can pay for your base software you can pay for your extensions, so know this culture when planning your budget.

Click here for Forum Marketing - The Dirty Topic [Part 2]

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