How to add a forum/community to your blog - Community Building

 Lately one of my friends wanted to add a community to his skateboarding site and to be honest I never had a good track record building communities, i’ve tried it several times so I know a thing or two about them, communities are twice as hard as making an established blog, in a blog atleast the latest post is on the front page and not in a forum/category or something, so it’s easier to get more exposure on a blog then  a forum. I did some more research anyway and I think this post is different then other posts I’ve made so here it is, tips on how to add a forum to your blog.

The Forum CMS

Now before you go off in full swing to all the top forum script sites (paid) think about what it might do to you financially if it didn’t work out, it’s better to start out with a free forum script that can be transferred to a better paid forum script later on when it’s more established, here are my top 3 choices.

PHPbb

bbPress

Vanilla

I’m personally using bbpress on my installation of wordpress in the news area, it’s not an actual forum, it’s more of a contribution area where people can suggest wp themes for my posts.

The strategy

 

In my opinion the best strategy is to hack the blog into the forum so that whenever someone wants to add a comment to the blogpost they go to a topic in the forum to discuss it further on, that way it might spark a more interesting discussion rather then on the blogpost itself, Ars Technica has been doing this for a long time, personally I love that strategy of theirs. 

It’s also best to stay away from paid posting as much as you can, if you start off your forum with an incentive, getting organic posters gets that much harder in the future, I learned that the hard way with Gossip Forums.

The start-off

Like I said, getting a forum started is twice as hard as starting off a blog, usually people don’t join forums anymore unless they really really want to, and that’s highly unlikely to happen, so you have to improvise the first step to get users would be your friends and family, get them to join the forum and start topics and stuff, then goo on advertising your blog to the masses via free advertising, you would get the initial booster traffic at first but it will die out, after that you will definietly get atleast 1-2 new users/week. That would be the real growth of your forum.