Basics of starting a forum community.

I’ve have had at least 6 attempts to start an online community (forums, CMS, etc2x) and I’m sad to say that almost all of them are epic fail. I can say that I am very well experienced on the what ‘not to do’ in starting an online community. So at the moment I should be very aware of what to do in starting an online community.

First of all is to decide a niche for the community. General and ‘talk about anything’ forums just won’t click. Unless you’re one of the pioneering forums, but still the forums will start to die out anyway, as members of the community will find more interesting forums with their niche of choice and start to post there more and more. Niche’s should be narrowed down and then narrowed down again until you get that topic that you are comfortable with. So gaming can be narrowed down to ps3 gaming, which in turn can be narrowed down to ps3 hardware until you get that niche that is specific yet is not limiting for the users.

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Start a team. Nothing is more boring than doing something alone. That also goes with starting a community. The advantages in having a team are; they have friends that they can refer to your forums; they can help you in making content; they can make starting a community and making it flourish faster. BUT, having a team will always have its disadvantages too, especially if the admin is not careful in hiring a mod. This happened once in a forum I started, the mod I hired was trigger happy (moving posts, deleting posts, changing post titles, editing posts) and the new users got pissed off and moved to another forum. That was one mod that caused the death of the forum. Though I could have saved the forum by kicking the mod. I didn’t want to lose a real life friend. Lesson that I learned, is to not hire someone who has not been recently active in the community. Chances are the mod will only want the power that moderator title brings him/her and is not really interested in the community.

Write on paper. Before a building is made, it has to be written on blue print. Forums and other web community’s should be started in the same way. Start on paper, plan everything, including structure, forum design, forum name and niche. Write your plans on paper, that way you will not be staring for hours on a monitor without any basis on the actions that you will be taking. So plan, erase and plan.

Visiting other forums. To have an idea about your community and how it might work or the problems it will face in the future, you will need to atleast have been part of a community of your niche. This is important, since the culture of the people that might be visiting your forums will most likely be the same.

Have a good background knowledge on the niche. To drive people to your forum, you need to be generating good content, and to generate good content, you need to have an expert on the said forum. Well, you will need to have friends to be the experts if you are not one yourself. You or your friedns will also need the credibility to back your expertise up.

Those are about the things that I failed to do. Also remember that an online community will not be succesful right then and there. So you need to be patient and I cannot stress this enough, patience is the key to success in any online community.

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