How to Have a Successful Website Forum

Make it look great. The look and feel of your website and forum impact how your visitors and members perceive your community. The more professional, engaging, and customized your forum design is, the more likely it is to attract members to join and return. Make sure your forum's look is appropriate for the type of community it hosts. Many websites exist that offer well-designed free or premium themes for popular forum software, a selection of which have been included in the Resources below.

In addition to having a nice looking forum, it is important to make creating topics easy for your members by minimizing the number of topic areas. This reduces the amount of micro-management you have to do moving threads into the "right place" by giving members more generalized topic areas to post in.

Generate content by spending some time each week creating new threads to help drive conversation. If you tie your forum into a blog or news feed, invite your members to discuss each post. Use services that allow re-posting of articles if you don't have the time or skills to create your own, or create a weekly format and assign volunteers from the community to write. Volunteers will gain the prestige and recognition of being a primary contributor to your website while you benefit from the traffic the new content can generate. A weekly format may include one full-feature article about your chosen niche, one spotlight on a popular thread in the forum or one profile piece on a community member.

Promote your forum by linking to it in conversations you have across social networking websites. Offer signature badges or graphics to encourage your members to promote the site in other forums. Be active on other forums and comment on websites that compete with or compliment your website or niche and conduct yourself in a friendly, knowledgeable way that will attract visitors to join your community.

Maintain and moderate often or promote mature and responsible members of your growing community to help you. Moderation is key to keeping members happy. Without moderation, your forum runs the risk of bullies chasing off your most loyal members, spam, offensive content, or content that departs from the topic and loses a reader's interest. At the same time, you do not want to be too heavy-handed. Establish a policy and post it so it is available to your members, then adhere to it.

Offer existing members an incentive for inviting friends or helping promote the forum. Successful incentives include special ranks or titles within the forum or anything that builds recognition, free products or services you can provide, or monetary rewards if you can afford them. Contests are another incentive to draw prospective members to your website and get involved. A contest could consist of a members-only photo-editing competition, wallpaper or graphic design contest, or something that can benefit your website such as a slogan contest. Results can be used to create content for your website in the form of galleries or blog posts.