Basic steps of building a community

[zeus]

Forums does not have any switch that you can just put it on and it will start running automatically by itself. And also there are no general procedure or steps to start and run successfully an online community. But there are some elements which are important and must be taken care of in order to run a forum.

Gather information on your niche as much as you can. First of all start small. Often people make this mistake by creating huge number of boards and sub-forums. After some time they fail to update regularly all the boards and it looks empty which is pretty bad for a new forum. Start with the most basic categories of your niche as boards and once it starts generating content by itself or have enough content in them, you can split them into sub-boards.

Forums are all about content. So build content every day. Atleast 10 topics per day is a good number for a new forum. And if more then even better. Nobody wants to join a forum which is empty. Read everything, every article that you can find in your niche and create your own articles according to them. Remember true knowledge is always the main power. If you are starting a forum then people will come to you with their problems and you must be able to solve their problems.

To run a forum successfully and to get members who are willing to contribute to your community you must must outreach to the right audience. SMO, PPC use any medium you like but make sure that in that medium you are targeting the correct crowd. My personal favorite is forum marketing. Its free & totally helps me to get new members and not to mention it gives me plenty of targeted traffic.

Thanks for the insightful information Paul.