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How to build an active community

Thread title: How to build an active community
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01-18-2006, 12:30 AM
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  Old  How to build an active community

Here's an article I wrote about a year ago. I hope some people can benefit from it.

How to build an active community by David Myers of inb0x.com


Today’s webmasters are always striving for new ways of bringing activity and new members to their message board. There are lots of articles out there that will tell you a lot of different ways of achieving your goal, but I’m going to try and sum up everything you need to know with this article.

Before you bring your forum to the public, make sure it looks appealing to the people that your website is targeting. I would recommend you stay away from the default themes, as your forum would end up looking like a lot of the other forums out there. You would want a unique theme that goes along with the kind of website your forum’s going to be on. For instance, if your website was all about computers, you might want a tech feel to the design of your forums.

A mistake most webmasters make when starting out their message board is having too many forums. If you have too many, then your message board won’t look active, and you will lose members because nobody wants to post on a dead forum. I recommend you start with around four to eight forums. That way your message board will seem semi-active. As your message board grows and you gets more and more activity, then you can add more forums.

Another thing you should do before you release your message board to the public is you should make sure that you have plenty of threads. That way new members will have places to post. Also, you might want to make some threads that will really spark your member’s interest. Get them debating and involved.

It’s a hard project getting an active forum, so here are a few suggestions if you want to start with a bang:

• Have a contest where members can win forum privileges, such as a custom member title, etc., or actual items
• Pay a few people to do a certain amount of posts to get your website active
• You can do some post exchanges with other webmasters, that’s a good way to get your forums going without spending extra money that you don’t need to spend.
• Post around at forums and notify people that your forums are up
• You can exchange links with another forum in the same general field as yours. You need to be careful, as you don’t want to do a link exchange with a website just like yours. If you do that with a bigger website then yours, you might lose more members then you will gain.
• Make an introduction forum so your members feel welcomed

And here are some ways to keep your members:

• Give out custom member titles like: Top Poster, Most Improved, etc.
• Keep active on your own forums, never stop posting!
• Keep adding new things to your forums. Most forum software has many mods that you can add to your forums.
• Create a section where members can give comments and critique your forum. It’s a great way to feedback from the members of what you need to improve
• Make sure your forums have a set of guidelines that members have to follow. That helps your members not get out of hand

Another part of making a forum is luck. It’s finding those members that will post, and become completely involved in your forum. It’s hard finding these members, but only a couple of them will keep your forums going smoothly.

Now you’re on your way to having an active forum!

This article was brought to you by David Myers of inb0x.com

Copyright : You may use this article again on your own site but the content must not be altered in anyway. All links must stay intact and this article cannot be resold, it is free to use with the restrictions noted here.

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