Is Forum Writing Productive?

You either love forums or you hate them! They can be well run and moderated or they can just be rubbish. However they cannot be ignored as a good forum brings in traffic by the ton. So are you wasting your efforts by posting on them or not?

I love forums! Heck I love them so much I now even advise other people how to build and run them.

If you have a website and are struggling for traffic then posting regularly on a good forum can boost your sales and your traffic beyond belief and all for free. Even just posting ten times per day in a forum that is in the same niche as your own website can bring huge amounts of free traffic.

One of the prime reasons for this is the use of your "Signature" box - This enables you to put a keyword back linked phrase to your website, and best of all it is a one way back link, which is just the sort that Google currently loves! So the more you post on forums with your signature linking back to your site, then in effect the more one way back links you are building to your website.

One way back links are notoriously hard to get. Sure you can buy software that allows you to search for blogs related to your keywords and then post comments against them,but most blog owners now manually approve comments, so if you post a spam comment which is clearly just intended to gain nothing more than a back link, then it will be rejected for sure.

So yes forum writing is productive, not only does it build traffic but it builds one way back links as well.

By regularly writing on a popular forum you will become known as an expert on your subject by your peers, and should you decide to launch your own product then you will already have a list of potential buyers "Warmed up" and ready to sell to.

The other beauty of posting on a forum is that you can do it twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. It does not matter where about in the World you are.

If done well writing on forums can actually bring you enough business to give up the day job. Yes it is me that I am talking about. Around about eighteen months ago I threw in the towel on my day job and started to write full time. So yes I would say forum writing can be more than productive!

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Creating A Forum

Do you have a great idea for a forum, but are not sure how to go about creating one. Well building a forum is easy in one way but very hard work to get up and running if you are not careful.

Now forums are great for building repeat traffic and with repeat traffic you should start earning some real money over a period of time. But many forums come and go, as the fact is that you may have the best idea in the World for one, you may hit upon the latest hot to have niche, and you may build a great looking site and have laser focussed forum topics, but then you get nobody signing up or posting and in the end you just give up.

Building the front end of your forum is the easy bit, no really it is, now "Creating a forum" is where the skill comes in.

Your forum needs a good look to it for sure, but it also needs to load fast, and be easy to navigate. You also need to make it as easy as possible for people to register, yet at the same time you need to make it hard for autospam bots to register. If you do not stop the autospam bots at the start, then you will spend most evenings and mornings just moderating spam and deleting fake users. In the end if unchecked this will make you feel like giving up, and many do, that is the reason why creating a good forum is such hard work.

Now if you have had the sense to get good anti-spam measures in place then the next thing you need to be concentrating on is getting posts and threads up on your forum. It is so simple, the more people post, the more people post! A circular argument but one that is so true.

Creating a good forum is very much down to the quality of the posts you have on it. If you have a load of junk on your forum then people simply will not sign up, so you need to keep your forum well moderated at all times.

Getting people to post when they join can also be an issue, with many forums seeing only one in ten people that sign up actually posting on the forum. Crazy but true. So in an ideal world you need a few friends to get your forum up and running, or use the services of a professional to help build your forum.

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Forum Boost

Have you just started a new forum, but are fed up that your board looks empty and that nobody is signing up to your forum even though it looks great and you have picked a great niche to run it in. If this sounds like you then it maybe that you need a forum boost.

So what is a forum boost or forum boosting as you may have heard it called?

Well forum boosting is whereby you pay someone to help get your message board off of the ground. You can spend as much or as little money as you like to do this. It really does have some great benefits: -

Your forum will rapidly be populated

It will look "Busy" as a result more people will join up

The more people post, the more people will join and post, it really is that simple

You will buy a guaranteed number of threads and posts.

It really will kick start your empty forum into life.

To start with you may think "Well I can just post myself under several different names" - Well that is true, but on average you will have to have posted well over a thousand times or more before your forum becomes self sufficient e.g. new people start joining and posting. This can take a lot of time, and if you are working full time budget on doing around fifty posts per evening.

Clearly it will take you some time to reach the number of posts I mentioned before you forum becomes self sufficient. On top of this you will need to budget for at least an hour a day to moderate the forum and keep it spam free.

Many people start out building up their own threads and post before realising the benefits of using a forum booster. With most companies you can take out a "Trial Boost" which you can use to test the water and check out the quality of the companies posting capabilities. Typically these packages offer a boost of two new threads and ten new posts. If you try one of these and they go well then you might consider a much large package of 100,200 or even 500 posts to really get your forum off to a flying start.

If you use Google AdSense on your forum, the long term revenue will far outweigh the cost of paying for a forum boosting service at the outset.

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Forum Moderation Tips

I broker judgments for a living, and one of the very many tasks a judgment broker does is to administrate an active free web based forum. However, I have a very long history of administering, moderating, or sub-administrating judgment - and several other topic-related forums, networks, and email and chat systems for decades.

Back in the days when I started, it was before the web. I ran (Bulletin Board System) BBS systems that used modems and regular phone lines. Besides the free judgment-related forum I currently administer, I currently help administrate and moderate about ten other web-based forums these days.

There is one strict definition of what an administrator does - the person that deals with maintaining hardware, issuing passwords and security policies, and upgrading the software. This is only one part of what is required to keep a forum useful and interesting.

The other part of a forum administration job is the social part, the human interface "guiding function" (known as the moderator). This moderation function can be done by the same person, or a different person, or a different person, or a group of people.

In this article, I would like share my opinions on the social aspects (moderation) of forum administration. There are many problems maintaining forums, which include spammers, hackers, rudeness, politics, lack of fairness, keeping discussions on topic, advertising, grammar and spelling, and monitoring verboseness. (This article would be less useful if it was 50,000 words, so I will aim for about 500 words.)

Sometimes moderators are selected because of their knowledge, sometimes because of their helpfulness, and sometimes because of nepotism. Nepotism has ruined more forums than any other moderator-related reason, because nepotism can cause permanent problems and resentment.

The best moderator cannot simply be smart or helpful or responsive or fair. The best moderators must have several of these qualities, and the time to do their job. As I see it, the job of a forum moderator is to:

1) Answer questions.

2) Help stop problems.

3) Encourage cooperation and learning.

4) Be open and tolerant of alternative ideas.

The worst things a moderator can do are:

1) Arbitrarily allow some members to do things that others cannot. (That is unfair.)

2) Delete postings, or ban members who simply politely disagree with any discussion. (Forums are designed for open discussion.)

3) Being lazy, or too busy to do their job. (Being a moderator is a responsibility.)

4) Be careful when editing other people's words. It is OK to correct spelling errors, or to move a discussion to a better topic location, but it's not right to put words into other people's mouths.

5) Keep your personal feelings and biases out of your job. I have heard about moderators calling newbies (those new to the forum), and telling them lies, or telling them not to post replies to certain other members they are envious of, or do not like.

Forums should help people and provide information. Products and services useful to most members should be allowed to be discussed. If there is no interest in any topic, the discussion will soon fade away.

As long as members are civil, polite, and obey the rules, all members should be able to post (write) whatever they wish without fear of hostility or retaliation.

I have met forum moderators that feel their users need to be protected if someone else writes something that is not exactly the way they like, so they feel they should deny opportunity and choice to all their members.

Forum moderators should think twice before deleting or censoring a message post. The rights of freedom of speech may not apply to private clubs or forums, however the best forums allow freedom of speech.

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Forum Moderator

Actually building a forum website is the easy bit, yes that is right installing the software is only around 5% of the work needed to get a good forum up and running.

Once you have uploaded the software you will then need to configure the colours and the general theme of the website, and upload you own logo. Whilst it can take a lot of time to do this and get it looking great, this is only the first step on your road to creating a good forum.

One of the first issues only new forum will have to deal with is spam, as forums attract every low life spammer there is out there. It does not matter what your forum topic is, they will spam it regardless. They do not care if they are putting up adult links on a forum for children.

So you will need to moderate your forum right from the start. You can choose to pre-approve members but it you do this you will limit the number of people that actually sign up in the first place. Just ensure that they have to confirm their email address, this alone will cut out eighty to ninety percent of the forum spam.

You should also set up your forum to ask the users registering a random question, and make it a word answer e.g do not put 'What is 2+5' as the question, make it something like 'What is the capital of America'. This should stamp out all automatically generated spam. Do not use the question with numbers in as some of the autospam bots have even been programmed to look for and answer such questions. Yes that really is how sad some of these people are.

You will also need to set aside at least an hour a day to moderate peoples comments in line with the rules you have set out in your forum.

Things to consider are to only allow links to other sites from peoples forum signatures. If people repeatedly put links in their posts then you should class this as spam and delete it. Repeated offenders should be banned and all of their posts deleted.

Eliminating the forum spam at the start will help you to run a good forum that people will want to join and keep coming back to, A poorly moderated forum just puts people off joining and coming back.

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How To Boost A Forum

Okay so you may well have got your nice new forum fully installed and configured, you may have changed the theme to something that looks really good but now you have to get your forum some visitors and that is where life starts getting very hard. People may find your forum in a search engine but if it is looking pretty empty they will not stay around long or join. So how do you boost your forum?

Well the painfully expensive way to get traffic to your forum is via Google AdWords, and trust me it will be expensive, and if you have no threads or posts up when you start your campaign you will be lucky to get anyone signing up at all. You may as well stand there and light $20 bills.

Boosting your forum members is hard, and you may feel like giving up, however persistence is the key. It may take you six months to get one hundred members. My first forum did, but then within less than one month I had over six hundred members!

You really need the help of at least a dozen friends to help you give your forum a boost, and even then you will have to harass them to help as there is nothing in it for them. You could ask your friends on other forums to give you a hand and this is a free way to boost a forum, but they will also only be able to give you so much of their time to help you get going.

Your other alternative to Google AdWords would be to use Facebook ads which are cheaper are more target focussed, however in either case you will be faced with the same problem, in that even with the best looking forum in the world you will not get anyone signing up if it has no posts or no threads.

You may try and start them yourself, but this can become very time consuming if you are doing it in the evenings and at weekends. You will have to join as multiple people, and start and answer your own threads. This can be done but it is slow going and can take all the fun out of running a forum.

Your other solution would be to look at employing professional forum boosters, now you can find these individuals on internet forums and recruit them or you could consider using what I believe is the best solution which a proper forum boosting company, which can really super boost your forum to get it up and running.

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Internet Marketing Forum Has Benefits

Have you ever thought while reading articles on the Internet that one day you might have a question you want answered? Articles are a great benefit to all that write them as well as readers of articles. People get to share their knowledge who write articles while helping people who read them gain more knowledge of their topic. But I'm sure there will come a time that you will think of a question you'd like answered.

In today's world the Internet is where most people go to find what their looking for, and the majority of this is information. There are massive amounts of beneficial knowledge to be gained from the internet, but unfortunately some wild inaccurate and misleading information has made it onto the internet as well.

When wanting to get those questions answered the place to go is an Internet marketing forum. They are simple to sign up for, and the great news is there...Free. If you have never joined a Forum it is a Web site or an area of the Web site. Once you've signed up you are now a member of that forum where you can post information and discuss what interests you. Forums are usually organized by topic.

In a forum there exists broad categories where individual members create the topic. Whoever starts first creates what is known as a 'thread' by making a statement or by asking a question. A member then will respond to that question, and another member will reply to the response, etc. This can actually go on for pages.

Here you can get valuable information, but like anything else people can be...unique at times. What I mean by this is where a reply from a member might be so far out in left field that it's basically a bunch of nonsense. At times, not too often though these left fielders have gotten belligerent and the referee has to take care of this behavior. Most forums are moderated, and this person basically referee's the forum to maintain site's policy and keeps members from abusing one another. Keeping subject matter on the topic.

Basically an Internet marketing forum is a forum devoted to marketing goods and services over the internet. You and other marketers could help to answer each others questions, which then helps both marketers in their business. Through your participation in the forum as an Internet marketer, marketing your product or service as well, you will find others looking for what you are marketing. So forum participation benefits all those who stay active by letting people know what you market, and also by making sales.

Another benefit to a Net forum is that they tend to be populated by regular members who over time grow together and create a sense of community. When marketing a product or service over the Internet there are times when some moral support will be just what you need. Even though marketing over the Internet involves reaching out to potential customers, and providing goods or services to existing customers, you can still feel isolated at times. So it's good to be around like-minded individuals where you can engage in shop talk.

Got a question about Internet marketing? Just starting out and have a lot to learn? Or maybe you have a lot of experience and would like to share? Join an Internet marketing forum. Not only can you do all that but you just might find that you enjoy being a part of a community with like-minded people.

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