mightyhitter.com

Running a Forum

A friend ask me what is best forum software available and what is the tips for getting the targetted ads into the forum. Although it is well-known that forum won’t give you much in the ads revenue (especially Google Adsense), but having a try on it is no harm.

To start with, you can get a copy of xoops, phpbb or joomla for free. Xoops and Joomla are not only good for a forum, but they are CMSs with quite a number of fan.
Prior to that, it is good if you use a paid hosting where no forced ads are imposed.

Once you are ready with a good domain name and done with installation of the CMS of forum, put some good skins on it. Normally Xoops and Joomla comes with a lot of free skins/themes, or you may want to buy some of better quality ones. Skins price range from $20 to $50.

When you are done with the skin, try to dig some information on how to customize the forums. In Xoops, for example, start looking for a way to create your own block. A block in Xoops is a piece of HTML or PHP code that output some info to the users. Customized blocks are necessary when you need to perform some customized actions or display non-standard data. For example, you may want to put addtional column such as users wish list into the database and display it later using the block.

The other thing to consider is to attract more visitors to the forum. First, you may want to define which is the targatted user group of the forum. Then start running some ads for this. Ads can be free, such as putting a status in the skype or YIM, or inviting friends via email. Or maybe you can join a traffic ranking network for that purpose, or maybe echanging links with other webmasters with the same interest. Else, if you have an allocated budget, try running adwords with Google for this purpose.
Once you have few members, ask their cooperation to spread the words about the site. Offer free email accounts, for example. Other than that, try adding original content to the site - make it as a glue to your site so that people will be visiting it everyday.

The last thing to do, when you are done with visitors, good contents etc - now it’s time for a commercial part. You need to finance the site, else you will be ending up paying your own money for the hosting and web space. Go for Google Adsense, or Chitika or YPN.

There are more legal tricks for these PPCs all available freely on the net. Get some advices on ads blending, hot spots, ads blindess etc.