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Selecting a Good Forum Niche
Choosing the topic of your forum is an important decision. If you have your boards centered around a topic no one wants to talk about, no one will talk about it. There are two things that should be focused on when deciding if your forum niche is appropriate - if you want to talk about it and if others want to talk about it. You need both.
Choose a Discussable Topic
Your topic should be on that can be talked about. You have to be careful not to choose a topic that’s too saturated. If you choose a popular topic, it will be difficult for you to make your forum more appealing that the bigger ones. You’ll have to work much harder, in this case. “you should aim for a niche that’s specific, but not too specific. For example, poetry my be more specific than writing, and thus a good topic; however, Shakespearian poetry is probably too specific. People have to want to talk about your topic. Make sure your topic is not obscure - discussing an unpopular book or creating a forum for the Amish probably won’t generate much activity. :p
Choose a Niche you Enjoy
While still important, choosing a topic you enjoy is still something you should consider. One must enjoy the topic and be knowledgeable in it. Creating a forum, blog, or other website you know nothing about is foolish. You have to personally want to talk about it. Oftentimes, the administrator who runs the forum runs forums on topics they’re passionate about. If you don’t intend to be active in your community, choosing a topic you like isn’t all that important. However, it certainly aids in a forum’s early days and in creating a community.
Forum Inactivity - Another Forum Killer
There are many things that scare users away from your forum. Perhaps even more than excessive advertising or a poorly design skin, an inactive or empty forum will keep users from participating. Contrary to the popular saying, “if you build it they will come,” an empty forum rarely, if ever, gets posted in. They may come, but they won’t post. Even if your forum has 100,000 posts or more, if it’s inactive, no one will post. Doing so would be like talking to yourself; your post would echo, and no one would hear.
The truth is that unless your forum is active - getting posted in daily, it won’t grow. Even if the admin posts, it’s unlikely a user will post consistently because they’d only be talking to one person.
So, what’s the solution?
Simple. make your forum active.
How? That’s a good question.
Three Ways To Start Your Forum Posting:
- Invite Friends - If you have any real life friends or acquaintances who are interested in the topic of your forum, let them know about it! I never did this myself, but I know that it would have helped my forums in their beginning days significantly. An additional bonus to having your friends post on your forum is that they’re much more likely to stay, simply because they already know at least one person who posts there. This is very beneficial to your forums growth. You want to develop a tight-knit community.
- Talk to Yourself - Create three or four accounts and post on all of them. Make conversation with yourself. This gives off the impression of activity, even if it is fake. This can get tiresome, but it looks better than an empty forum. This is useless if you’re not getting traffic, but if you are getting a steady flow of traffic, your visitors have a much higher chance of actually signing up.
- Post Exchanges - Trade posts with other beginning forums to help initiate conversation, increase activity, and build content. This accomplishes the same thing as you creating multiple accounts, except these accounts are fake. They’re from real people who might stick around after your post exchanges are completed.
The three methods above are only three of many methods of generating posts for your forum. Having an inactive forum is having a useless forum. Even if your forum isn’t active with genuine discussion, you need to, at the very least, give off the impression of activity.
Three Ways Not to Generate Posts:
- Paid Posting - A year or two ago, paid posting was the hype. There were tons of forum posting services promising quality posts for your forum. While there are some legitimate forum posting services out there, most are from 14 year old foreign children who’s first language isn’t English. Most posts are a sentence or two long. Regardless of the quality of posts, paid posting doesn’t do much for your forum. While it does accomplish nearly the same thing as you conversing with yourself, paid posting is temporary; you “talking to yourself” is not.
- Automated Content - Following the paid posting craze was a surge in automated content. I’ll admit, the aspect of having 100,000+ posts automatically was intriguing and I took the bait. It was too good to be true. The software I purchased was buggy and only worked sometimes - a few weeks later it didn’t work at all. On top of this, I was publishing duplicate content. In addition to the technical issues I faced, the idea of having thousands of fake posts also devalues the community. If the forum does get off the ground, it’d be hard to get a community feel from a forum that has a fake majority of posts and users.
- Nothing - The worst possible thing you can do to help your forum grow is nothing. While this may seem obvious to some people, to others it is not. Some people think that if they set it up, a forum will build itself. This is rarely the case. I was fortunate enough to have this happen; I set up the forum and didn’t visit it for months. I returned to it later and was surprised to see it active. This happens less than 1% of the time, so it’s not something you should count on. Keep in mind that typically what you put into it is what you get out of it. If you work hard, you’re likely to get good results. If you slack, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Why You Should be Active in Your Community
Each day I’m finding out more and more how important it is to be active in your online community each daily. Recently, my forum had a period in which I only had limited time and limited access to a computer for about three weeks. During this time I was extremely busy and adapted to not doing much work on the forum. As a result, my forum’s daily post rate dropped down from an average of 350 posts/day to about 150 posts/day for most of the month of November.
Once I returned to the site, I made a few minor changes and improvements the users were asking for, and began to participate more on the site. Almost immediately after I returned the post rate increased steadily by nearly 80+ a day more than the previous day. Now we’re sitting around 550 posts/day and still growing. Moreover, instead of having around 80 users login in the past 24 hours, we’re now back to around 105.
If you take a look to the right you can see a chart of the posts from each day. I’ve marked it with when I returned. You can clearly see the posts/day rate. Keep in mind that the 100-200 posts/day were consistent for the whole month of November.
I don’t take sole credit for increasing the posting rate because it really is the members that did it. I just supported them as they posted. I helped spur on conversations. The only real changes I made were rearranging some forums in response to suggestions and improving what subscribers received, which I honestly don’t think had much effect. I think there are several reason for this. One reason that comes to mind is simply the psychology of having a leader - if the board feels there’s someone in charge, it makes the board more strong and official. If an administrator never logs on, the user begins to think that the administrator no longer cares.
While I cannot say with 100% certainty that the forum posts/day increased because I became more active, I feel that this did strongly play a role. If I were to leave the forum for another three weeks, I feel confident that the posts/day count would drop back down to below 200 posts/day instead of the more healthy 550 posts/day. I believe that if I continue to be active in my community each day, the number of posts each day will continue to increase.
To summarize, you should be active in your community daily, because this can significantly increase activity.
Blog Posting - How Much Is Too Much?
If you’re like most passionate bloggers, you probably post once a day, or more. You’ve probably even been told that posting at least daily will help create loyal readers. Some prominent bloggers even post three to four times a day. While this strategy does work for many larger bloggers with huge subscriber bases, it typically doesn’t work, especially for a beginning blogger. Creating a loyal reader base is how to make a blog successful. Readers who visit the site daily and comment on your blog build it, the same goes for RSS subscribers. For this reason, you want to do everything in your power to make sure your readers return; this includes not overwhelming with too many posts, which posting daily often does. If you post frequently, readers may simply get tired of reading your posts. Not only is reading time consuming, but chances are if a reader subscribes to your blog, they probably subscribed to a few other blogs as well. If these other blogs post daily, you can see how this can get quite tiring for the blog visitor. If a reader subscribes to three blogs that post twice a day, that’s six posts to read every day. Moreover, the daily RSS email reminders (if they subscribed via email) can litter their inbox and become annoying.
While this isn’t always the case, typically daily posting are of lower quality. Oftentimes these posts are either poorly constructed or republished information. Instead of focusing on how fast you post, focus on the quality of the articles. Content is king; not the amount in this case, but the quality of it. It’s better to have one high quality article than five poor quality ones. The sooner the blogging community realizes this, the better.
I suggest posting two to four times a week, instead of posting six to twelve (or more). If you could pick a consistent number, pick three posts/week. Doing this gives readers time to read your articles without feeling overwhelmed. Moreover, it lets you focus on making high quality content and gives you plenty of time to do so.
Now, there are some exceptions to this posts. For example, if you blog about something related to news, it wouldn’t make sense to only post two days after the facts. For real-life, time-essential blogs or posts posts as soon as possible.