How To Plan A New Forum Launch

New forums are like new blogs and face the same challenges of little to no content. So how do you build readership and motivate users to not only register but to contribute to a new forum that is empty?

Having an overall plan is a must when launching a forum. What I like to do is make a plan for the first four weeks of a new forum. In those first four weeks I make sure to maximize my time and efforts to fill the forum with new content and market it to the best of my abilities.

Start With A Handful Of Topics

The easiest thing you can do to appear to be a full and active forum is to keep it small. Having many times have you seen a forum that has every topic under the sun with only one or two posts in each topic? This is a dead giveaway to visitors that your forum isn’t really that active, it’s fairly new or it’s and abandoned forum.

By keeping things small and compact the topics that are available will fill with new post faster and appear to be more active early on. Here’s a a few suggestions for topics that I like to start out with in a new forum:

Introduce Yourself – New users feel safe here!
General Conversation – Sometimes users vent or have general questions
News or Reviews – Users can check in on new industry posts

By starting out with broad topics it opens your forum up to new users and enables them to ask broader questions. There is no need to be an expert and new users tend to feel more comfortable asking general questions.

Post Consistently

This is probably one of the most important rules I follow and make sure that I schedule time for. With forums the work is done up front! Building a great community with content that attracts your target market needs to hapeen first for long-term success.

Once the train gets moving and the community starts posting on their own you can take a breather and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

If you do not put the hard work in up front it will take longer to reach this tipping point and you will lose potentially great contributors to your forum. Worst of all you may become unmotivated and ditch the forum yourself!

One way to stay current, about the topics to post about is to set up a Google Alerts about your industry, product or service. This way you can at least reference a news source or someone’s review and choose to agree or disagree with the viewpoint.

Don’t Forget To Ask Questions

Although your job is to populate the forum with as much relevant content as possible remembering that you do not have the final word on all things is important.

When writing for forums especially early on I found what works best is to ask questions in your forum posts. For example you may write your opinion about what you think, but make it a habit of closing with a question like “what do you think?” or “anyone ever use this?”

Stick To The Plan

Believe it or not the toughest thing in the beginning is going to be sticking to the plan. Make sure to do it! Don’t skip scheduling your calendar, your Blackberry or your Outlook alerts! Do what you have to do but do not skip this part as it is the most crucial point to getting your new forum off the ground.

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