Top 10 Popular Goals Every FORUM Owner should Set
Forum owners from around the world have chosen to administrate their forums for the love and passion of a like minded trend that is being set forth in motion with new and upcoming technology. Every forum owner dream is to not only own and run a forum, but to own and run a successful forum. Success is based on a number of factors such as strong SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION) marketing practices and few SQL page queries to cut back on page load time. If you study the methodological trend of successful forum owners, you may notice that they do not have the most flashiest of forum theme design, or the most side boxes on the index page, but these successful forums have an all around lasting appeal and well versed in multiple facets of forum ownership. In this article, we will be highlighting and discussing the Top 10 most Popular Goals Every FORUM Owner should Set for not only themselves as a forum owner, but for their forum community as well. A strong forum community is one that constantly and consistently delivers an active user generated content stream of new polls, topics, and replies.
GOOD SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION)
By using various key words that apply to your forum’s niche category, you are aiding users of search engines to quickly and methodically search for and find content that pertains to their search queries. Various search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, allow users who input keyword search criteria into the search box to quickly pin point content that relates to their interests. Most forums who have a strong SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION) campaign will also have a strong Google Page Rank and a high impression and average daily page view count.
STRONG MARKETING CAMPAIGN
If you wish for your forum to become popular, you are going to want to invest both your time and money advertising your forum niche brand across the inter webs. Various ad publishers or social marketing companies such as Google’s Adsense and Google’s Adwords along with Facebook’s strong ad publishing suite, will help to nudge your forum in the right direction and towards online user’s who take interest in your forum’s niche. The most popular of internet forum’s have owners and employed staff members who contribute in advertising and promoting their forum community both online and offline in the real world. One of the best marketing campaign strategies is to make use of social networking such as Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter.
NICHE BRANDING
By branding your forum’s niche, you are focusing solely on the overall subject category that your user generated content covers on an average daily basis. By branding your forum’s niche into the web of the internet, you are creating a name for yourself as the forum owner, and the forum itself, amongst a slew of already popular and active forum communities. When generating content on your forum, focus more on article content that caters to your forum’s niche, and you will be branding a name for your forum world wide.
ATTRACTING GUESTS
You are going to want to attract as many guests as possible to your forum since not all guests are going to register as an actual member. Keeping a steady flow of new and returning guests is every much as important when compared to keeping a steady flow of new and returning forum members. Attracting new forum guests can be accomplished by continuing to publish new content articles that caters to both the interests of your forum’s guests and your overall forum niche category. In addition to the potential of a guests registering as a forum member, even guests who never register as a forum member, still count as a user of the forum and towards your forum activity meter.
ATTRACTING MEMBERS
Forum guests are only going to register as a forum member if they get something out of it. Sometimes forum guests register as a forum member to simply be apart of a participating forum community. Other times, a guest may register simply for gaining access to more site features if you have chose to hide certain features of your forum from non-registered members (guests). Don’t sweat that you do not have a high member count or an active member participating in content creation. As long as you are attracting new and recurring guests your forum activity can only get better.
CATEGORY LAYOUT
A forum with a cluttered category layout may be a turn off for potential new members. When first starting off with a community forum/message board, you may want to limit the number of categories that are displayed on your forum’s index page. Once your forum fills up with more and more content such as new posts and topics, then simply create new categories and move those older forum posts and topics to the newly created categories and expand out from there. If you think to big, and have such little user generated content, your forum could portray an awkward categorical layout when compared with much less cluttered and more active forums elsewhere.
FEATURES
Not all successfully active forums are loaded down with features. Some active forums have very little to no more features than what was included with their standard or vanilla forum software installation. Sometimes though, having the right feature could prove both cost effective and beneficial in the long run. A few popular features a forum could implement include a chat room or shout box, money or points system, or even a thank you or like system. If you are unsure on whether or not you want to install a certain feature, ask yourself if the feature is what you want, or what the community wants, and whether or not the feature will benefit the forum community in the future. Before installing any plugin or feature upgrade, you are going to want to verify the security of such scripts and code that run the feature along with the developer support of the person who coded the feature or plugin script.
PAGE LOAD TIME
If you have to many plugins or upgraded features on your forum, then you may notice that your forum page load times are extremely high. Many plugins use hooks or SQL queries to power a feature or plugin upgrade, and to many of these SQL queries that have to be initiated, then an increase in page load times should be expected. Put yourself in the guest or member shoes. Would you want to join a forum or participate in the user generated content community if the forum’s pages take forever to load? A bloated forum chalk full of features is a slow forum. Don’t worry so much as features or installing plugins, focus your attention instead on content creation pertaining to your forum’s niche along with quick page load times.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT THEME
A forum with a terrible theme design is just as bad as a forum with user generated content which has no correlation to the forum’s niche. If you are new to the world of graphic design or slicing and coding .png or .jpg or .jpeg or .bmp or .gif images, then you may want to out source a hiring process for a professional graphic artists who can both design and code the design into your forum’s software installation. Don’t get to carried away with a load of colors from the rainbow. Try and focus on two or three different colors that match and blend well with one another. A forum with a theme that looks like a rainbow could distract a guest user or registered forum member user away from the user generated niche content. A few types of excellent graphics software to check out included GIMP, Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe Creative Cloud, or even Paint.NET.
MONETIZE
Every one wants to make money, and what better way than from the comfort of your own home. A few notable ad publisher’s that a forum owner should check out are Google Adsense and BuySellAds. Many ad publisher’s require websites or forum’s to have an active member base, high page views, high impressions, or constant fresh niche related content. Many content ads and link based ads are targeted to keywords that are used in your niche related article content. Before you even think about plastering advertisements all over your forum’s pages, consider how much money income you will generate if you have little to no niche related content or even constant fresh niche related content. A strong method into gaining extra brownie points with ad publisher’s is to have a strong SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and page rank score. If your forum has daily fresh and new niche related content that drives in visitors then you can expect to monetize your forum in the future.
Discussion Topic: Top 10 Popular Goals Every FORUM Owner should Set
