To engineer a successful forum, there are three key questions an administrator needs to ask before building the forum.

Goal #1. How will you gather a critical mass of members
Goal #2. What will compel members to provide content
Goal #3. How will the forum survive pass the first year
In this article we cover goal #1 – how to gather a critical mass of members.
Be niche

Your forum has to build a name for itself as the authority on a subject. All successful forums have something that sets them apart from the rest. For example, it could be the unique content of the site, an under-served niche demographic they target, or the personality of the site administrator.

If you’re creating a forum, ask yourself, “What will people get out of my forum that they can’t already get somewhere else?”

All successful forums have a purpose. They exist for a specific reason, to accomplish something. To connect people with common interests, or to facilitate conversation on issues related to the site.

One major reason many new forums fail is because there are too many forums on the same topic! Forums will not be successful if their sole purpose is building traffic for the main website.

Choice of forum software

Getting this right is critical. There is a high probability the existing forum posts will be lost by switching to different software later.

Consider search engine optimisation first. Since 85%+ of new traffic to your website will come from the search engines, having your discussion forum posts found by the search engines is essential.

Before you choose a discussion forum software package, make sure that all the posts within the forum can be found and ranked by the search engines. Most discussion forum software hide messages posts in such a way that they simply cannot be crawled by the search engines.

One way to find out if message posts within a specific forum software package are search engine optimised, is to visit a site using that software, copy a recent forum headline and paste it into Google and do a search (surround the search headline with quotes so Google knows exactly what to look for).

If the message headline comes up within the first 50 pages found by Google, you know the forum has been optimally indexed. If the headline doesn’t show, you might want to look for a different forum software package.

Most of the major forum scripts are geared for SEO, but there are ways to improve results further by adding search engine friendly URLs, or in the case of vBulletin, adding vBSEO (a full suite of SEO enhancements).

Dynamic URLs, session ids, etc. used by most forum software can be very detrimental to the forum health from search engine point of view.

Take care when choosing the type of forum and forum script or software that will be used. The forum should be easy to find and easy to use. Some forum scripts and software come with compulsory ads served from the parent company, and lead to a poor user experience.

Focus content and discussion

Users will sign up and post on your board if they find the existing content interesting, and consider it worthwhile to participate. Establish several interesting categories within your forum, without going overboard.

When launching the site you will not have many members, so keep the content focused on a few discussions only to avoid empty rooms. It is far better to have 4 active sections than 15 empty ones.

Don’t be afraid to lump similar topics together. Once a forum grows to a size where threads are pushed to page 2 and 3, then consider splitting a forum into two smaller ones.

Do not have too many off-topic discussion areas. Instead create one or two introductory discussions, where new users can post about themselves and existing users can welcome them.

Know that before making the forum public, it is a good idea to create maybe two or three threads in each forum area, so visitors will have somewhere to post. Many new forum users are too shy to post new threads on their own.

Function over form

Users care more about the content and community than the design. Image heavy sites have a high first impression, but subsequent low usability. Image rich sites take longer for each member to read threads, make a new post, move between forums etc. If the page refresh is slow, users post less and are less inclined to return. Google and Yahoo are not particularly attractive, but very successful search engines which observed the law of efficient page refresh.

Design should not be the focus, instead improve the user experience with clear and easy to use navigation, few fancy buttons and images and making sure everyone understands the functions of the site. There is no substitute for good form design, consistent branding, clear and readable type and ample white space.

Use hacks, add-ons and features sparingly

Many forum scripts have hundreds of freely available add-ons, for example, vBulletin, including social networking add-ons, live chat, shops and arcades.

The trick here is to employ fewer features, but do them well. Avoid making the mistake of adding so many features they become a visual barrier to new users, or slow existing users’ posting. Add too many features too quickly and you do not allow enough time to measure them, or allow your users to adopt them.

A simple, clean layout with features that promote registration, referral and posting are all that is required.

Super easy registration

Almost all forums have some barrier to entry, to screen out trolling and spam. However, a common mistake among forum administrators is making registration complex.

For example, some forums make you agree to rules, answer security questions, validate your identity via email and await moderator approval. While these measures counter spam, if your signup process is long and tedious, many users will give up. Try to achieve a good balance between security and ease of use.

Apart from making registration hassle-free, offer registrants some kind of benefit to join other than permission to post. These could be freebies or downloads.

Set your barriers to entry to be either large or small. Large will net you fewer members, but quality; small will gain you more users but of mixed quality.

Member referral schemes

Many forums fail due to a lack of publicity. Tell your friends to join, and if they find it interesting, they will tell their friends, who will in turn tell their friends etc. This can tie in very well with a referral scheme, whereby users are rewarded for referring other users to the board. Word-of-mouth advertising, in tandem with other forms of advertising e.g. SEO optimization, Google Ads, link trading with other forums, can result in a powerful combination which will draw more and more users to your forums.

Seeding links in other forums

Get people aware about your forum/site for free, simply by joining other forums and having your link in your forum/profile signature. Emailing sites such requests can attract negative publicity, as recipients may perceive you to desperate spammer.

The best technique is to join another forum. Have a link to your site in your signature, and try to make 10 or so posts each week. If you get a great reputation on the forum, people will check out your link. If you are a credible, it is likely people in those forums will join yours.

Useful forum articles

Forum design
Building content
Long term survival
Anthony Coundouris is a director and digital consultant for the digital marketing agency Firestarter.

Digital products are everywhere you look. Even “physical” products like CDs and DVDs are, in essence, digital because the tracks and other information stored on them is in digital format. But increasingly products like books are being turned into digital products with devices like the Kindle.

Digital products have the advantage that they are cheap to deliver, costing only a few cents in bandwidth.

But if you want to create them, you need a system otherwise they will be chaotic and you won’t be likely to get repeat orders.

Here are the basic steps for your digital product creation system:

1. Make an outline

This can be in any format you want. A Word document, a spreadsheet or a mind map.

Play with each one and see which works best for you. Personally, I find spreadsheets easy to work with as each section of the product can be in a column with the subsections in the rows below it.

For more complicated products, I find a series of mind maps is also easy to use and can be more “at a glance” than a spreadsheet.

2. Decide on a format

This may sound as though I’m teaching you to suck eggs but take a step back and think how your information is best presented.

A PDF book can be good if your subject matter is fairly complicated. But in common with its physical counterpart, it tends to be the lowest retail price.

Audios are next in price value and can be convenient for your customers as they’re not locked into using their computer to listen to your product.

Videos are typically highest price and with screen capture programs such as Screencast-o-matic they’re inexpensive to produce. Or you could use your webcam or the video on your phone.

3. Create your product

Using your outline and preferred format, start creating your product.

Especially if it’s a written product, treat the writing and the editing processes as entirely separate. They use different parts of your mind and if you succomb to the temptation of editing as you go along, you’ll reduce the creativity of your product and it will run the risk of sounding more like a text book than something people want to read.

Save the sections of your product with different file names. Ideally ones that will make sense in a few months time when you go back to create an updated version!

4. Create a sales page

The complexity of your product and where you’re selling it will jointly determine how long and how “flashy” your sales letter needs to be.

There are free sites out there which will help you to create a passable sales letter without too much blood sweat and tears. There are also software programs available which will take this to a higher level. Or, if your product is likely to sell in quantity, you may prefer to use a copywriter.

Once your sales letter is written, you’ll need to upload it to your web host along with any associated images.

5. Upload your product

Use the control panel in your web host or WordPress or an FTP program to upload the files to your website host.

Depending on how paranoid you are about people stealing your product, you may or may not decide to include some form of protection for this. Remember that Hollywood have a much bigger budget than you and they can’t stop piracy so don’t put in so much protection that you annoy your purchasers.

6. Promote your newly created digital product

Promotion of your product is essential!

You can drive traffic to it in lots of different ways including articles like this one, forum posts and signatures, a Facebook page, your LinkedIn profile, pay per click advertising, affiliates and much more.

I am going to teach you how to optimize your efforts of product creation and create your digital products in only a fraction of the efforts you are putting in. If you are into high ticket products, then you would have set up a product funnel of low priced and mid priced products.

In order to optimize your efforts, you need to use these products in all possible ways. Except high ticket products which are your flagship products with unique signature, your low end and mid end products can be tuned and converted in to many varieties with almost similar content.

o What to tell the customers: The simple rule is to tell everything about your products to your customers. The more information you share, stronger is the trust that will develop. If you withhold information from your prospects, then they will not trust you completely. Especially at the high end of your products, customers will have access to you personally and will ask a lot of queries. Except the very detailed technical information, you must inform them about all other aspects of the product.

o Choose your niche: Being an expert in one niche is highly essential for the success of your business. Whether you want to write an e-book, or create an audio product or a video training, you need to first be an expert in what you are talking about. Do everything possible to gain knowledge and skill in your domain. Only then you will be able to provide the value your customers are looking for.

o Create an outline: Planning is of utmost importance in product creation. Start with a master plan which includes all your products and they production timelines and marketing campaigns. For every product, create another outline which includes the key messages that you want to convey to your audience. Have up to 10-12 such messages which you can use as chapters in case you are writing an e-book.

o Fill in the flesh: Once you have the skeleton of the product ready, you need to add in the contents to give it some shape. For each of the main 10-12 point that you identified earlier, you need to add in your comments and create the final product.

Now we come to optimizing your efforts. Keeping the same skeleton, you can change the content a little here and a little there and create a new product altogether. For instance if you are writing an e-book on yoga practices and have divided your e-book in chapters for heart health, muscle strength, immune system and so on, you can create one e-book with one set of yogic postures and another e-book with another set of yogic postures. For every bodily problem there is more than one yogic posture that contributes to health.

So the important point is that you must have a good grasp of your subject. Only then you would be able to optimize your product creation process.