Out of the thousands, if not millions, of forums available, I often find it difficult to believe when someone says they cannot find a forum to suit their niche. If the niche is that tight then perhaps there is just not enough traffic to warrant a forum. On the other hand, there are many forums that may well suit the niche, but a poorly run and full of spam. If you cannot find a forum you like, you can always start your own – and they are really quite easy.

If your web host uses cPanel and Fantastico or similar, you can often find a couple of forum programs already available. It’s simply a matter of selecting the one that best suits you, installing and configuring and away you go. With some of the latest forum software around, you can be up and running in just a few hours – and you don’t need any software knowledge. phpBB and SMF are two of the common packages available.

Once you have installed the forum you will need to promote it to get visitors. You could use the forum as a way for your customers to interact with each other and your self. If this is the case, simply promoting it on your own web pages could be sufficient.

There are two important areas that you must be vigilant about when including a forum as part of your onsite presence. The first is to be very strict on spam and unrelated content. Nothing turns users off faster than seeing a forum full of spam. The second aspect relates to your business. Be sure to respond to questions and issues that are raised in the forum, particularly those that may have a negative impact on your business. Forums can be great for building reputations, they can also do a lot of harm to your business if not maintained.

Starting your own forum is easy, it can be of great benefit to your business, however they can also take you away from business time wise. If you have the time – try one out.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 4:40 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, Social Marketing, Social Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.