One effective way of promoting a forum is with posting contest. I’ve ran a few in the past years, but the one I’ll talk about today is the first for my new General Forums. In the past it was pretty easy to find sponsorship for the contest. My old forum targeted a niche, I actually had sponsors in back-order, just waiting for us to finish one contest and start another. It wasn’t so easy for this contest, but we’re still young (3 months old) it’ll get better as time passes.

I purchased a small site today, and will merge that this weekend. After I get that imported, I’ll send out an email to everyone and work on the newsletter that will be sent out in another week or so.

This is going to be a rather short post, just wanted to get a few links out to the contest. I’ve had so much go on lately and have thought about putting it down in a blog post several times, but never get around to it when I’m in front of the computer. I’m going post pics and use my tumblr account as a mini blog, I’ll see if I can tie it into a widget or something on this blog. I didn’t realize this, but I’ve had that account for 2 years! Time sure fly’s..lol

What are some of the ideas you have for promoting your forums, we’re like to hear them?

This last weekend I had the pleasure of merging one of the first vBulletin forums that I can remember looking at when I started switching from phpBB to vB. AlienSoup.com had been around for 10 years before I purchased it and merged it with General-Forums. I’m very appreciative to have the chance and opportunity to make this happen.

As some of you may know, I’ve purchased 4 or 5 forums and already have merged them with my General Forum. I’m always on the lookout for the next great deal and awesome content to add to our forum. Since our AlienSoup merger, I’ve had a few people contact me, one person has 2 medium size gaming forums that I might purchase, another guy had a great NBA forum, but it was well out of my price range, although it would have been great to add it.

I made a Twitter account for the forum called @GeneralForums, I’ll use this account to post site updates as well as search for our next merger. I have my personal account (@BrandonSheley) which had close to 20,000 followers before I started unfollowing 10,000 users that post spammy links or don’t interact the way Twitter was designed. I’ll build it back up once all the spam is removed and I have a little wiggle room to add great users all over the world.

Now that the General-Forums has some great content, I can focus on building links to the new categories, as well as my article marketing that I was doing before the whole ThinkBigTopeka movement started! I’ll get back in the routine of getting a new blog post up at least once a week, if not twice. I loved the interaction that I was building on the blogs. Your comments are what keeps me going and with the latest PR update, they help you just as much as they help me.

This brings me to another point before I go. I will be looking for sponsors that would like to get their name out in our first forum contest. I’ve ran 3 month long posting contest in the past and they’ve been a HUGE success, I’m looking forward to our first contest on General Forums.

Thank you everyone for sticking with this blog while I’ve been busy! I will not disappoint you for your attentiveness, and will do what I can to reward you or any new subscribers that come along.

Over the past 2 or 3 years I’ve had the pleasure of watching Chase Speers excel with his state specific forums. He’s won a number of awards for his flagship forum (TalkDelaware.com) including BOTM on my old forum “vBSetup” as well as on vBulletin.com & vBulletin.org. TalkDelaware also won best website in Delaware for 2007 beating out the local newspaper! Chase has a state forum for Pennsylvania called TalkPA.net which has also won a few awards and honorable mentions.

Chase started chatting on forums about 5 years ago on a cell phone forum. He enjoyed it so much; he soon offered his help moderating the forums and became good friends with the owner Steve. That forum eventually was sold. Chase & Steve started up a few more forums, but Chase wanted full ownership of a forum, just had to think of a good topic. That’s where TalkDelaware comes into play, there is an “official” Delaware website that Chase was part of, but it didn’t seem like management had a full understanding of what could be done with their forums. Chase was determined to make a better forum for the state of Delaware, and that’s exactly what he did.

The official Delaware site was full of spam, trolls and just about every nightmare we as forum owners can think of. It was full of rude people who didn’t care who they pissed off and weren’t afraid to let their voice be heard. Chase was optimistic about the good people on this forum, and that’s who he would target when setting up his own forum. Chase became a very active user on that forum helping out everyone he could, all the time having his new Delaware forum linked to from his signature and maybe in some of the post as well. This can be a long process, but will get you quality users over time and in some cases; they will add your forum link in their sigs, thus recruiting more users. The only thing I would caution you about using this method, if you don’t want to get labeled as a spammer or possibly kicked of the forum you’re recruiting from, so test the waters and see what you can get away with.
If you look at the TalkDelaware forum, you’ll notice a custom style that matches icons seen throughout the state. This is the same on TalkPA as well, and I think it was a vital decision in his forum being successful. You want to let your members feel comfortable, and what’s a better way than tying in some of the great historical points of your state, into your forums.

To quickly summarize what I’m trying to get across in this article; don’t ever give up, be passionate about your topics and give your members what they want. Having a unique skin will help if it’s tied to the subject matter like TalkDelaware is. Provide help across all forums will help your membership grow, just like Chase did on the old Delaware forum, he offered his help and the members followed him over to his new and better forum. Chase also provides help on webmaster forums, including graphics help and suggestions to managing your community, which I feel he knows a great deal on both topics. Provide help to your members, and offer them incentives to stay on your site, and they will help advertise your site without you even knowing about it.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first article in my series on being a successful forum owner, please comment and let me know what you would like to know about in my next article.

My thoughts on vBulletin and IP.Board.

If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I ran a vBulletin powered forum for many years and just recently sold it. I’ll try to outline a few of the reasons why I “switched to the dark side” and setup an Invision Powered Services forum. The number one reason I would have even considered sticking with vBulletin is the vBSEO product. IPB does have SEO mods but they just don’t seem to match up to the power that vBSEO brings to the vBulletin platform. With that being said, I made a thread on the IPB support forums titled “How to SEO our IPB forum” I’ve picked up a few tips which I’ve implemented on my IPBSetup forum, but there has to be a few more options I haven’t found yet.

I didn’t have a problem at first with the buyout of Jelsoft to internet brands, but after seeing all the old developers leave and the drastic changes that have taken place; I see why people were getting so upset over it. I like how Invision actually uses their CMS for their homepage, vBulletin just has some generic html pages up which do look good, but it’s not showcasing the ability of their suit when they are pushing hard for sales. I had a chance to do some early beta testing on vBulletin and boy did it have a lot of bugs. I know it was in beta but I would of thought some of the major issues would be been fixed in development, it seems they just want to push something out and make it appear as if they care about the end forum user. I think they are really just interested in their own network (iNet) but I could be wrong and I hope I am because I still have a lot of friends that use vBulletin for their forums.

One thing I really like about IPB and wish vBulletin would consider adding this to their lineup is the search box in the admin control panel of IPB. You know how on yahoo if you start typing something you’ll get a dropdown box with suggestions? You’ll find the same thing in the IPB admincp area; it’s been very helpful for me since I don’t know my way around IPB yet.

I don’t think it will be long and IPB will be the #1 forum software for professionals, especially the way iNET is running Jelsoft. I do wish everyone the best, I still love vBulletin but IPB is climbing up with every chance I get to mess around and figure things out. My next big purchase is going to be IP.Content and I’ll have a tightly integrated CMS that will match my forum. This is something I had always wanted from vBulletin and even with the new vBCMS, it just doesn’t fulfill my needs like IP.Content will.

What are some things you like about vBulletin over IPB or IPB over vBulletin? I look forward to your comments. This is a dofollow blog, so search engines will spider your links.

I’ll go over what it really takes to be a successful forum owner and how you should go about building your empire in the following weeks. I have a few people that I’ve already mentioned this blog post to, and they are very interested in being showcased. If you’ve built a successful forum and would like me to do a blog post on you, please contact me via email and I’ll consider adding you to the list.
Some of the topics I’ll highlight will be.

• How you can easily build backlinks and traffic to your forum.
• What you should consider when building your community (members point of view)
• What topics/threads should you start up on your forum?
• Should you use a CMS?
• Types of sites you can build to support your forum.
• What forum script I would suggest.
• Check out the competition.

I’m looking forward to writing these reviews, I’ve had the privilege of watching these forums grow up while I ran vBulletinSetup and I’m honored to have known these admins.

Here is my first article in the series. (I’ll update this list as the articles get published)

• How to run a successful state niche forum

I’ve been running vBSetup for years, since June of 06 actually. I’m not going to lie and say I won’t be sad to sell, but it had to be done. I just don’t have the time to commit to the forums like I did before Leo came around.  I’ll still visit the forums a few times a week, but not having to worry about software/hardware updates and issues is going to be a huge relief for me. I announced to the members yesterday of the purchase and had an overall positive take on the acquisition. I look forward to seeing what Crowdgather does with the site. I know they have some great resources and can really push the forum to the next level. I’ll miss being able to email or market anything to 12,000 users with a flip of a switch, but I think I’ll still be talking to all the active users via Twitter or other forums.

I’m not leaving the forum scene all together; I had purchased IPBHelp a few months back when I was thinking about expanding my services to IPB. I got a job with the state shortly after I purchased that license and URL and didn’t really have time for it. I still don’t have a lot of time, but enough to tinker around with it once a week. I’ve already added a WordPressMU to the root as well as IP.Converge which will allow users to login to the forum and their blogs with the same login (email & pass). I don’t have it working 100% yet, but it shouldn’t take me much longer. I’ll always love vBulletin, but doubt I’ll ever own another vBulletin license unless I win the lotto and free up all my time, which I don’t even play so that’s not likely..lol

Everything else is going great; Leo is crawling and getting close to walking. I’ve been busy “baby proofing” the house because Leo likes to open the cabinets and any drawer he can reach. He is finally sleeping through the night which is AWESOME! It only took him 7 month but his mother and I are very grateful for the added hours of sleep.

Well that’s a short update of what’s going on, I plan to post a disc golf blog post at some point, so that will probably be the next update you see on this blog.

Have a good one everyone, and thanks for reading this blog post. Please Retweet it (if you’re on Twitter) or share the link with your friends. Word of mouth is the best form of advertising.

Are you a forum owner, or would you like to be? Forums require a scipt and hosting to run. I’ll quickly go over some of the basics that you’ll need to setup your own forum. First off the script, I prefer vBulletin, but you can use IPB as well as free scripts like SMF, phpBB and MyBB.

I choose vBulletin for a number of reasons, one being the upgrades. As I previously mentioned, I had used phpBB before switching to vBulletin. I hated updating all the php files when you needed to do an upgrade on a modded phpBb forum. I’m not sure if the current version of phpBB has easier upgrades, but I’d had enough of phpBB. Time for vBulletin the professional forum script; I had looked at IPB (the other paid alternative) but was not impressed with the actual look of the forum from a users point of view. I used vBulletin for the first 9 months and it was great, then they released the plugin and product system which allowed mods to be with one upload and a click of a button. The product/plugin addition also made the upgrades much easier. You could update a fully modded forum in a matter of seconds, you still need to update each of the templates but you’re still saving time of updating php files.

One of the great addons for vBulletin is a product called vBSEO. vBulletin Search Engine Optimization in one single product. You can do a number of the tweaks that vBSEO does with other addons, but you can’t do everything and who really wants to install 20 hacks to take the place of one? Not to mention the strain 20 hacks will have on your forum and that’s just 20 more chances for a security exploit. vBSeo is the #1 SEO script for vBulletin, I will not start a forum without it. Even if it’s a very small forum, and low on funds, you have to take every advantage that you can in optimizing your forum for search engines.

So if you want the best forum possible, you’ll want vBulletin and vBSEO. Now we can talk a little about hosting. You should be able to get a good host for less than $10 a month to start off. Then as your site goes, you’ll need to extend your hosting packageto cover the traffic and bandwidth that your site will be consuming. If you want to host several sites, you may want to look into a VPS or virtual private server. That’s what I use on my websites it allows me total control that your shared hosting plans aren’t going to give you.

I hope I’ve explained a few things here, feel free to ask any questions. I’ll be posting some articles on building back links and advertising for your forums in the near future. If you do need any help setting up your vBulletin forum or would like to talk on the phone and brainstorm topics for your forum, you can contact me at my Professional vBulletin Services pages on one of my other blogs.