Forums are hot internet properties this year, largely thanks to Jeremy Schoemaker and Lee Dodd showing just how profitable they can be. Unfortunately they are also very tricky to start, maintain, and grow — and most barely make it past the starting line.

I have started a grand total of 3 forums. The first is still up, and hardly gets any use at all. The second went up on a larger site than the first, but I couldn’t get anyone to use it. The third is live and has a very active niche community of around 5,000 users after 7 months.

Based off of what I have done, and what I have seen others do, here is how the typical “newbie” starts a forum:

- Uses lots of catagories and sections
- Hires paid posters or creates alternate nicks and talks to him/herself
- The forum is the entire site, or..
- The forum is a tiny “forum” link buried on a navigation bar
- Expects real visitors to start showing up once there is enough content to pull in SE traffic

These are all mistakes. When and if your visitors do stumble upon your forum few will register because the corrects functions are vacant. Your web site is a machine, if its set up wrong visitors will not convert into registered users — this is not magic.

Follow the “newbie” steps, and you aren’t going very far — at least for a while. Be prepared to wait 12 months or more before you see any real activity. Instead try these steps.

- Set up the forum with 5 sections max.

- Configure your forum to show a message to unregistered users asking them to join.

- E-mail two or three contacts within the niche and invite them to join and make a few posts.

- Send real targetted traffic to the forum. If its PPC its going to be expensive. Find blogs and other niche sites that will link to you. If you need to run a contest or do something noteworthy, do it.

- Most importantly, have a content site in your forum’s niche that you can direct traffic to indefinately. If you can’t do this, find another site(s) that can.

If you have the traffic, there is no reason you can’t set up a forum in an already flooded niche. Typically dominant players will have dissatisfied users.

Years of age result in a growing bureaucracy of rules which put many people off. Forum owners get lazy/complacant/afraid of change and their sites starts to look like a museum (yes, I do mean WMW.)

I believe that some people create rules and limitations in their head simply because they are so used to following the paths of others. For example, there is no reason you can’t start up multiple forums in the same niche, check out TanTalk and IamTan.com. Look similar? Check is out with a whois, it is the same.

Judging by the 80/20 rule it would appear that starting a forum is the hard part. Based on experience, its just the beginning of a very big journey.