Forum in 30 days

[agua]

OK I have an idea for a forum - but with quite a short life span.

Is it possible to launch a forum and get traffic and people posting there within 30-40 days?

If so any ideas would be welcome :)

[s2kinteg916]

not really in my experience unless u have boatloads of traffic... like howard stern website i think which was relaunched

[Emancipator]

yes it can be. My latest forum has 18,000 posts on it. 0 of which i paid for. Good topic, reasonable design, and some posts to entice discussion and you can do anything.

[agua]

s2kinteg916 - I know where your coming from... which is why I posted - but Emancipator - I'm going with your way of thinking :)

This is a good topic - not covered independently and I believe an easy topic to entice discussion.

I'm going for it and will report back here with progress - after 30 days.

[Emancipator]

my suggestion is do some warmup posts, cross link to good content on your site. Also link relevant posts from your content. It will encourage discussion. My first month I had 4,000 posts and it has spiralled from there.

I am no webpub guru by any means. I just screw around and have fun. So if I can do it, you definitely can.

[Cutter]

Short lifespan, like a game or movie?

It can be done.. but I would challenge you to ask yourself what the goal of the forum is. From what I've observed, forums do best as a longer term project. I run a pretty big forum, and from a pure PPC ad dollars standpoint its one of my most pathetic earners in terms of time invested to profit ratio. That being said, the real value of the forum can often comes in what the members can do for you.

[Westech]

If you want to get it off to a quick start you might try allowing unregistered guests to post and buying some Adwords or other advertising to get things moving.

[Emancipator]

cutter was your comment about short lifespan directed at me? And Westech I at first allow guest posts, and then once its got a stream i disable it since thats when the spammers start popping in to. Never thought about doing adwords advertising. Any suggestions on strategy?

[Cutter]

Nah, it was for agua. My guess is he is making a forum for one specific thing/product/etc. If you can create the forum around a whole genre or type of product then you'll be fine because when one thing gets old members will keep coming back for the new stuff, like a movies forum.

[Emancipator]

ahh ok, no worries i was just trying to figure out the post and how it related to what i said :P

[agua]

The forum is about a single topic - even though I said its short term... It recurrs at irregular intervals - so I suppose its long term really...

I was just over looking at Simple Machine Forums (http://www.simplemachines.org/) - it looks pretty good, has any used this before - or should I stick with VB?