Building a Forum Community

Interesting article:

How To Build A Popular and Profitable Forum Community

From the article:

You may have heard that having a web community is a great way to increase sales, customer loyalty and word of mouth for your web business. In fact a web community itself, if large enough and targeting an affluent demographic (or one that advertisers like to target), has the potential to bring in revenue. Commonly people use a web forum as the centre point for a web community. However building a popular forum is no easy task and requires patience and dedication.

There are many sites that exist primarily as forum sites, where large groups of people gather on a regular basis to talk. For example, this page discusses a forum site called go-gaia.com that "boasted (as of 12:30 AM on 31-Mar-04) 5,384 users online (out of 441,818 registered users) and only 47,190,029 posts." That's a lot of traffic. Go here for a list of the biggest forum sites on the Web.

Forum sites are pretty easy to set up. A site from a web hosting company like this lets you install the software and configure the database in seconds. Once the software is running, you use an administration area to set up all of the different forums and categories. Pick a topic and you could be ready to go in a few hours. Then your job is to get people to start visiting and signing up.