How to build a forum that does not fall apart two months later, part 1

If you can get a large enough following from customer lists and newsletters you might want to start your personal forum. But I always see people trying to start a forum and falls on his face, especially because they make too big and they never promote it.

The main reason is because no one eats in an empty restaurant. Do not set a "multiple topics" such as phpBB forum, which allows you to partition it off in different subjects. We must start small, just enough to get traffic forum for that type of forum to become self-sufficient before building bigger.

By this I mean start with a blog.

This blog (and eventually the message board) have a niche. You can not just have a general purpose message board hang-out, or is based on something very vague like "Marketing", or "Finance", or "computer". Instead go to something specific like a message board Copywriting. Or a message board on home loans. Or a message board on digital video.

It provides all the posts, and any "post" users will only comment on this journal. It requires no registration to post.

Give people the opportunity to sign up for e-mail updates, but do NOT use the built-in autoresponder blogging software. Instead of using a separate script autoresponder. Why? Two reasons:

1.) You can write a short message as teaser to entice subscribers to read your post boring automated notice as possible.
2.) This will make it easier to move subscribers at once rose from a blog (read on).

(WordPress works great for this and it's free.)

Start by allowing anyone to publish, but once you start getting traffic to that page and blog spam starts rolling in you will either have to seek approval from you to go through a comment or ask a poster of a type code to prove they are human beings (have you seen the kind).

It will be easy to get some traffic to your blog, if you keep most of the voices in article format, because then you can submit these articles to ezines and article directories with a link to your blog.

Keep going to the blog format, be sure to post regularly and if the content can be written in advance (Post To Future) so that if you miss a week the content will still be updated as if never left you. If you're feeling ambitious setup RSS feeds for the blog and submit to feed directories.

Keep posting until it reaches the point where after a post will receive comments from 10-20 different people within one or two days of the post. 10-20 This must happen without e-mail is sent, or any kind of active promotion.

Until we reach this point stick with the blog, it means that they have not yet reached critical mass, and any attempt to move to a more complex type of site will never work.

Once you've got those 10-20 spontaneous posts you can go ahead and make the transition from a blog to a forum. But be very careful. There are a lot of things that can go wrong, especially if the forum does not "unfold" properly, which is a technical talk to you in part 2 of this article .........