how to start a discussion forum
One way of getting visitors back to your site time and time again is to set up and develop an online discussion forum.Not only does this create an online community for you, it shows that you and your company are experts in their field by providing free online advice.
Forum software
There are a couple of well know and well used forum software products on the market place. The phpbb forums are free and popular and most come via your exisitng cpanel. There is an option for phpbb that you simply click and away you go - you have an instant forum
However: phpbb have been plagued by security issues in recent times and a lot of forum owners have been hacked and have had to spend hours re-installing everything. We believe most of these bugs, if not all, have been solved.
vBulletin forums
The most popular alternative is vbulletin and we have had huge success with this. The admin side is very easy to use and it is extremely “SEO” friendly.
In less than ten minutes, you can give your web site visitors the power to communicate - via a uniquely intuitive database driven message board system!
vBulletin is a powerful, scalable and fully customizable forums package for your web site. Based on the PHP language, backed with a blisteringly fast MySQL back-end database, vBulletin is the ideal community solution for all medium-to-large sites.
Building your forum
Like any website, building your forum and having it as a success can take time. If you add a forum to a popular site or you have a large email list then this is easy to promote. Just let everyone know and offer some incentives for posting. If you post on other forums add your new forum into your signature.
Set your new forum up with limited categories. If you have 40 categories that are empty no one will post. Start off with 4 or 5 sub forums and get them busy. Then once these are built up start to add more forums and the overall structure will begin to grow. You will need to be patient as this will not happen overnight.
At the beginning ensure you are online all the time. Reply to people’s introductions and add to the discussion.
