Building a Successful Online Forum

[ReverseEngineering]

There are nulled versions of all xenforo versions as well

Some include nice backdoors and trojans also.

Be careful!

 

[Digital Media Lab]

I think this is one of the rare journeys around building a forum these days.

This is the niche I thought was dying; it could be that there's a lot of potential still, but I've always struggled with this idea of building a forum from 0 members. The main upside of the forum is the community. If someone asks a question, getting multiple quality answers is essentially what it is all about.

What's your strategy on keeping the forum active and engaging?

 

[Mark Eternally]

There are nulled versions of all xenforo versions as well

I've been using one for years back in 2017+- and never had a problem

Interesting idea...

Some include nice backdoors and trojans also.

Be careful!

Yeah, this is one of the biggest reasons for my hesitancy.

I think this is one of the rare journeys around building a forum these days.

This is the niche I thought was dying; it could be that there's a lot of potential still, but I've always struggled with this idea of building a forum from 0 members. The main upside of the forum is the community. If someone asks a question, getting multiple quality answers is essentially what it is all about.

What's your strategy on keeping the forum active and engaging?

The common conception of online forums is that they are dying. I would say that online forums are here to stay, and that they have just morphed into barely recognizable platforms.

Twitter / X, Instagram, Snap, Facebook, Discord, and so forth are all online forums. They have the basics but just a new interface and accessibility. They have taken the BBS of yesteryear and supercharged them. Same concept though.

The old format, that you and I are using at this exact moment, still provides a solid solution for a lot of communities. Many of these communities that can benefit from "old school" online forums may not even be aware that such a solution exists. It is my belief that because so many people have discarded online forums such as BHW, or my own endeavors, it has left a void ripe with potential. There are definitely some industries or topics that this can impact more than others.

I agree, that people want multiple answers to their questions. They want conversation and thoughtful feedback. As I mentioned above, part of my strategy on keeping the forums active and engaging, as they are building, is through personas, or me having a plethora of accounts that pretend to be multiple people. This strategy seems to be working quite well. It is time consuming, in that I have to make sure everything remains consistent to each persona; such as back stories, grammar, syntax, favorite words, typing style, response times, knowledge levels and diversity, and so forth. A few of the forums have begun to gain their own traction, which seems to start around 50 to 75 members, where I can start to phase personas out of the conversation.

Something else I mentioned is that I am currently not monetizing any of the forums. I will probably start to monetize at a predetermined membership quantity. Some ideas on monetization are google ads, sponsorships that can have their own sub-forum or sub-forum moderators (for example they pay $#### per month and can have 2-3 sub-forum moderators to represent them in the forum at an official capacity (without the ability to delete posts/threads), or I just find very targeted advertisers who pay for banners like in the BBS days. I have not pinned down any one strategy yet and am open to ideas.

 

[Mark Eternally]

I am still working on this project.

Something that is amazing to me is the ratio of lurkers versus active members. I am getting memberships at these sites, but not a lot of posts. This is something I am going to ponder how to remedy.

I started monetizing one group of forums, mostly as a test for monetization. More on this at a later date....

 

[CreativeDaddy]

Following

 

[AshOasis]

Any updates to come? Maintaining several personas among a bunch of forums seems very labor-intensive, have you considered alleviating that with the help of AI?
Which path for monetization did you choose? If a very niche-specific forum is in question, I do like the idea of "paid sub-forum moderators" as long as their position as a 3rd party product/service representatives are made clear to the rest of users.

 

[Mark Eternally]

Any updates to come? Maintaining several personas among a bunch of forums seems very labor-intensive, have you considered alleviating that with the help of AI?
Which path for monetization did you choose? If a very niche-specific forum is in question, I do like the idea of "paid sub-forum moderators" as long as their position as a 3rd party product/service representatives are made clear to the rest of users.

Of course! I intend to keep this updated until I either making a decent income off of at least one of these, sell them, or they fizzle into oblivion.

Maintaining personas is easier than one might imagine. I have hundreds, if not thousands of them. It can be laborious at times, but not in the sense that it is killing me slowly, rather in the sense of having to walk places one must walk. Yes, I have considered using AI. More than considered actually. I have been using AI for a bit of time now helping me with article creation. With AI becoming more and more complete it is making it easier and easier for me to quickly get the results I want.

I have just been going the Google AdSense route because it is easy. Once I have some good data/history with them, as a baseline I am familiar with, I can look for other options.

All of the forums I have started are niche-specific. And even the every-so-slightly-possibly-more-broad forums I am running can have a sub-forum for any "brand" specific conversations where a paid sub-forum moderator can somewhat rule. The issue I expect with this is that I will have to have a Super Moderator who moderates these paid sub-forum moderators. If I can have paid moderators then I would be okay with having a super moderator handle this.

Several of my forums have been hit by 163.com and 126.com account creation "spam". I have just gone through my forums and banned these domains. Not good if anyone valid wants to join us, but such is life.

Earlier I mentioned that one of my forums was 4th in most Google SERPs that I am targeting. Well, I am glad to share that that forum is now 2nd! This is great news because the 1st result is an old established forum. I have been noticing they are starting to open up more of their closed areas which is probably in an effort to maintain their #1 spot. I also mentioned earlier that I estimate they have an insanely larger budget than I have given my forum. I have put $60 or so into this forum and it is very well ranked. I would be okay sitting at #2, but out of principle I would be even better bumping them to #2 and taking their #1 slot.

I was looking through my domains the other day and I noticed I still have a couple sets of domains that I forgot to establish as forums. So, I will be looking to schedule some time to fix that and get these domains earning some juice.

 

[AshOasis]

Of course! I intend to keep this updated until I either making a decent income off of at least one of these, sell them, or they fizzle into oblivion.

Maintaining personas is easier than one might imagine. I have hundreds, if not thousands of them. It can be laborious at times, but not in the sense that it is killing me slowly, rather in the sense of having to walk places one must walk. Yes, I have considered using AI. More than considered actually. I have been using AI for a bit of time now helping me with article creation. With AI becoming more and more complete it is making it easier and easier for me to quickly get the results I want.

I have just been going the Google AdSense route because it is easy. Once I have some good data/history with them, as a baseline I am familiar with, I can look for other options.

All of the forums I have started are niche-specific. And even the every-so-slightly-possibly-more-broad forums I am running can have a sub-forum for any "brand" specific conversations where a paid sub-forum moderator can somewhat rule. The issue I expect with this is that I will have to have a Super Moderator who moderates these paid sub-forum moderators. If I can have paid moderators then I would be okay with having a super moderator handle this.

Several of my forums have been hit by 163.com and 126.com account creation "spam". I have just gone through my forums and banned these domains. Not good if anyone valid wants to join us, but such is life.

Earlier I mentioned that one of my forums was 4th in most Google SERPs that I am targeting. Well, I am glad to share that that forum is now 2nd! This is great news because the 1st result is an old established forum. I have been noticing they are starting to open up more of their closed areas which is probably in an effort to maintain their #1 spot. I also mentioned earlier that I estimate they have an insanely larger budget than I have given my forum. I have put $60 or so into this forum and it is very well ranked. I would be okay sitting at #2, but out of principle I would be even better bumping them to #2 and taking their #1 slot.

I was looking through my domains the other day and I noticed I still have a couple sets of domains that I forgot to establish as forums. So, I will be looking to schedule some time to fix that and get these domains earning some juice.

Thank you for your elaborate reponse!

Yes, exactly, that would be my impression of managing a large amount of personas since I haven't had the necessity to do it myself yet. So, just guessing, but you're keeping track of each persona and their personality characteristics in a large spreadsheet? It probably also depends how in-depth you're going with them, as in, is it only the online presence mannerisms of typing quirks and behavior or do they need to have a whole backstory.

Having a super moderator to monitor the activities of paid sub-forum moderators didn't occur to me right away but it does seem necessary.

Good job on ranking 2nd already! It probably did make them a bit nervous about their position at the top. Ha, best of luck going for #1 spot. Have you thought of getting some of their users over to your forum?

At how many forums you'd be sitting at then if I may ask?

 

[Mark Eternally]

Everything is progressing slowly. The keyword there is "progressing."

I did cause some issues with a couple forums. I migrated them from one type of software to another and that cracked my SEO efforts. In two of the forums I even deleted valid active users! This was a stupid mistake on my part. Once I realized what I had done I made sure not to repeat it on other forums.

A couple of my forums have been hit pretty hard by spammers (haha, any of you targeting forums to generate links?). I have pretty much stymied them through the initial verification processes, but every once in a while a few hundred accounts may pop-up and that wastes my time deleting them. This may be taboo to mention here, but I have started reporting the IP addresses and email addresses to various blacklist services. I am just not a fan of my time being wasted.

I am currently working on how to get Moderators involved. Most of the forums are not big enough yet to need dedicated Moderators, but I want to be ahead of the issue.

Good job on ranking 2nd already! It probably did make them a bit nervous about their position at the top. Ha, best of luck going for #1 spot. Have you thought of getting some of their users over to your forum?

At how many forums you'd be sitting at then if I may ask?

Yes, I have been targeting their users. I lookup some of their semi-active users and find out where they work, then I reach out to their employer, introducing my forum and what it is about. I usually get one or two new Members from this from most smaller companies, and maybe half of the time my original target will also create an account. I do not target the highly-active users as they may have some brand loyalty and they may even make efforts against me. This is why I target semi-active users. Eventually, the active users will see the migration.

In a previous post I said:

Understood, but as this is an effort to start with minimal expenses I did not see investing $140 x around 50 sites as a good move. Most of the forums are going to fail. This is why I am throwing so many out there, to knock out the failures and allow the one or two wins to exist.

I bought around $5k (USD) worth of domains. If we figure 6 - 12 domains per forum ... I am going to manually "average" it to 9 domains per forum. The domains cost around $10 each. 5,000 / 10 = 500 domains. And 500 / 9 = 55.555, or 55 forums approximately. I think I actually bought fewer than 500 domains because some of them were a few pennies over $10 each, and different TLD's cost different prices. This makes sense because I think I have around 15 - 20 topics with some forums overlapping. I am just going off of memory which should give you a rough answer.

 

[blogmen]

I bought around $5k (USD) worth of domains. If we figure 6 - 12 domains per forum

Are you going to drop most of them after a year to avoid paying renewals?

Maintaining personas is easier than one might imagine. I have hundreds, if not thousands of them.

Damn, so you post for thousands of personas manually? I guess you were probably doing this before with alts on many forums but now you're at least making it worth your while. You're basically directing a movie and playing all the actors yourself.

How many posts do you write per day for the 50 forums?

I hope at least one of them blows up. Good luck!

 

[Mark Eternally]

Are you going to drop most of them after a year to avoid paying renewals?

If this project can pay for itself then I will keep the domains. That being said, there are a couple domains with this project that I can think of right now that I would probably let go.

Damn, so you post for thousands of personas manually? I guess you were probably doing this before with alts on many forums but now you're at least making it worth your while. You're basically directing a movie and playing all the actors yourself.

Yes, this is "manual" in the sense that I log in to each of them manually, have some AI write posts as a persona, post it, then log out and move on to the next persona. That is actually super easy. The difficulty is making sure it all looks natural. It would look weird if at at 8am EST an entire forum gets 20 or so posts within 30-40 minutes then no other traffic. Each persona has their own schedules. That is where it gets annoying.

And yes, I have been building identities for a while now. These forums are actually helping me do just that.

How many posts do you write per day for the 50 forums?

*I* write zero, but AI writes up to several hundred posts per day. Since one persona may be responding to another persona, I may have a post written on Monday but may not post it until Friday. So I end up with posts sitting around waiting. I wish there was a scheduled posting option, but that could get out of hand. I really do like that about Wordpress ... I can generate an entire years worth of posts in a month then just let it coast.

I hope at least one of them blows up. Good luck!

Me too!

As I mentioned, I am trying to find various ways to win at this.

Possible Win: At least one of the forums blows up and can make this project monetarily worthwhile.

Possible Win: Even if the forums do not succeed perhaps I can sell the domains with their new juice.

Possible Win: I am still growing personas that I can use in all types of other projects.

Possible Win: I establish good relationships with companies that could lead to other projects.

Possible Win: I am learning.

 

[Mark Eternally]

In an effort / experiment to condition my new found users to the joys of advertisements some of the forums have begun to cross-forum advertise. By "cross-forum advertise" I mean that if I have 10 forums, FORUM01, FORUM02, FORUM03, ..., FORUM10, then FORUM01 has now advertisements which point to FORUM02. These cost me nothing, but based on the forum focus the target audiences may be too wide. It is providing me with an easy way to learn and refine the advertisements so when I decide to go full advertisement mode I will be better prepared. As I mentioned, it is conditioning my users that advertisements exist and may not be entirely evil. I have pared the AdSense so I can better understand forum advertising.

 

[Mark Eternally]

Search Engline Land recently posted a piece about Google changing the name of "Perspectives" to "Forums". By itself, this is not solid evidence that forums are not dead, but it is a pleasant bump in that direction.

https://searchengineland.com/google-to-replace-perspectives-filter-with-forums-filter-438473

A summary, or the first paragraph of the article:

Google is rolling out a change to the perspectives filter, renaming it from perspectives to forums. A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land the word “forums” is a more intuitive name when seeking out that content. Google also told us that searchers can use this filter to hone in on results from hundreds of forums from across the web.

Consistency
As far as my project is going, I am just trying to stay consistent. It is my belief that, assuming you have a decent or better product or service, consistency can get you pretty far. So, along this effort of consistency, I will slowly make tweaks and modifications that improve things. How does this maintain consistency? By definition it does not, however, in practice, if done properly, it does and it improves consistency. The key is understanding the fundamental elements of a given product or service. If I make coffee, then ultimately the consistency is in the taste and service. I can change cups, store layouts, people, and even key ingredients so long as the taste and service remain constant. I mentioned changing store layouts, which is a touchy subject for some, including myself, but really people are repeat customers of a coffee shop because of their consistency in taste. If the consistency is on point most of the time, then customers will even forgive a miss here or there, so long as their next purchase realigns with their original level of consistency. If the desire is to change the taste of a product it either has to be gradual, or as an introduced new product which will eventually phase out older products and become the new standard.

With regard to online platforms, the consistency is in content, and to some extent design layout. Tied to content can be frequency of new content hitting, but this is not a law. I am not sure if there are any "laws" actually. (Even the concept of consistency can be broken.) For my project, I am trying to offer the same quality of content at a somewhat reliable/consistent stream/timeframe so my new found audience/community can get into the same rhythm. Once we are all in the same rhythm the community can experience greater growth. Of course there can be splinters of interest here and there and for those I will try to provide them sub-forums for them to branch out. I am even willing to start an entirely new forum if I see the interest (so far this is not the case).

I am still chugging along and the forums are doing the same.

 

[quimerics]

Hi,

I'm in the same game now. I have a gaming community in my maternal language.

I will follow this journey

All the best for you

 

[LauraGreen]

Well done, can you provide me your services.

 

[Mark Eternally]

As an update, I can see the forums that most likely will not grow and I am somewhat putting them into a predetermined loop of failure because I am not updating them as much. This is something which I have considered changing but it is a bit tiring updating a site that has bots as the only audience. This also allows me to focus on the forums that are generating new members.

Hi,

I'm in the same game now. I have a gaming community in my maternal language.

I will follow this journey

All the best for you

I would imagine having a forum in a non-english language would actually allow your target audience to focus in on your site. It would also scale down your potential audience, but that may be a good thing.

Well done, can you provide me your services.

No, I do not offer this service to others. This is just a fun experiment. I am sure if you seach BHW you will find others both far more capable than myself and willing to help you.

 

[Mark Eternally]

I have found another maneuver that has generated a wee bit of extra traffic. On the sites that are dying, I have advertisements towards the top of the forum pages. I have been placing advertisements on the poorly performing sites for the sites that are performing better, assuming the niche is remotely related. In doing so, I can see a small increase in traffic on my better sites. My guess is if someone can afford to advertise then people probably think it is better? I don't know why this is working.

Otherwise, I am just maintaining and building.

 

[Mark Eternally]

Some of my sites have plateaued in my opinion and I am slowly abandoning those sites. Other sites are seeing slow growth.
I did spend about an hour looking for "influential" people related to my more successful forums and crafted an email for them, and shot it off. We are talking around 12 people per site. For example, if one forum is about SEO, then I went and found people who tell a lot of people about great SEO resources, and invited them to the forum. So far I have seen nearly a 50% registration rate on those emails. That is not a lot if I only emailed 12 people, but the goal there is that they slowly grow the registrations organically, without me. We shall see.

 

[MIKENCO AGENCY]

This looks really helpful, I will keep following and updating new things.

 

[rusomike90]

How do you plan to monetize?