How many visitors do you need to start a forum?

[Rebecca800]

I'd like to start a forum one day for my SBI website, World of Lucid Dreaming. I've seen a few really good dream forums online so I know the potential is there for some great discussions. And it seems like a forum is a very good way to increase a website's popularity and presence.

I want to have more than enough traffic before I start a project like this.... an empty forum will just be a disaster! At the moment I'm averaging 1100 visitors a day but I'm sure I'll need more than this - so what is the magic number? 2000, 5000, 10,000...?

If you're a successful forum owner, can you tell me your starting figure? How did you kick start things into life? (I'm thinking a nice simple lucid dreaming Q&A would be a good start for mine.) And if you launched a forum that took a dive - what went wrong? I'm really interested to hear your experiences. Thanks

[spirit4711]

I don't know myself, but I would seriously consider a forum if I couldn't keep up with answering questions or comments on my blog. If that would take too much of my time a forum might be a good solution.

[CoolBee]

I've done some checks on forums I belong to before now - listing out members by posts made and it seems to me that what you really need is 20-30 very active posters to keep a forum alive, people who will visit several times a week, start threads, answer questions, pontificate, got opinions. You then probably also need another 40-50 occasional posters who pop in, say, once every couple of weeks just to add a soupcon of flavour!
Can you tell from your stats how many are returning visitors?

PS I just (sadly) checked this forum - there are just 676 members out of over 21518 who have made 100 or more posts including the legendary Angela at over 11000 with a sprinkling of members in the 3000-5000 range. A total of 51 members have made 1000 or more posts.

[KenBWM]

Hi CoolBee

I tried to leave a comment at one of your blogspot blogs, but it won't let me unless I am a team member. ???

[CoolBee]

Originally Posted by KenBWM

Hi CoolBee

I tried to leave a comment at one of your blogspot blogs, but it won't let me unless I am a team member. ???

Oh! Maybe that's why I don't get any comments

Can you PM me which blog which post please so I can investigate!!!

Thanks.

[mikethedrummer44]

I think it depends on how many of those 1100 you think will actually join the forums. I'm pretty sure someone mentioned a statistic of how steve's readers convert to forum users, but I can't remember it. But I think you should start it whenever you want. I've started several forums that only had 10-15 members in it, but they were all active, so it was worth it.

I'm pretty sure you have enough right now, and there's nothing to lose from making a forum. Especially for a topic like lucid dreaming, I think it's important people have a place they can discuss your methods, even if it's just you and a few people at first.

[Brutha]

Lifehack.org managed to fail to build an active forum even when they had a lot of traffic.

Seeding is very important. If you don't have action at the start, everyone who will come and look at the forum will see that it's empty and therefore don't participate.
You should seek 10+ people at the beginning who really want to post in the forum.

If you have a forum, please delete spam daily. It really makes life easier for everyone on the internet if it spamming attempts don't produce results.
It makes me angry to look at low traffic forums that aren't moderated and have spam posts as I also think: That's why I have to deal with so much spammers. It pays for the spammers

How much people subscribe to your newsletter?

PS I just (sadly) checked this forum - there are just 676 members out of over 21518 who have made 100 or more posts including the legendary Angela at over 11000 with a sprinkling of members in the 3000-5000 range. A total of 51 members have made 1000 or more posts.

Most forums are like this. There nearly always a power law curve.

[CoolBee]

I guess if you were really keen to get a forum going, you could set up a Mechanical Turk task on Amazon and pay people a cent or two to make posts to get things going? I have seen tasks a bit like that on there.

[Rebecca800]

Interesting, thanks for your ideas. So it's more about having a few loyal readers than lots of casual ones... I hadn't really thought of it like that. I have 1,000 newsletter subs, with approx 20-30 new sign ups per week.

I also have SBI's Content 2.0 running on a dozen pages which lets people comment on my articles, and this generates about 5-10 moderated submissions per week, which in turn generate more replies and unmoderated comments.

Maybe I should do a poll on my homepage and see how many yes votes I get for opening a forum..... I really need to gauge interest, dont I?

[Rebecca800]

You know what, I have been totally blind!

Since the launch of SBI 2.0, there's been a lot of talk about the (now free) Content 2.0 feature. This allows readers to submit their own comments - not just one-liners but whole stories and questions about lucid dreaming.

I have been using Content 2.0 for a few months now, and didn't really understand the full potential of it until today. Another SBIer shared his story of using Content 2.0 to build what I can only describe as a Q&A forum on his website... which brought him in $44k this year.

The page in question is here: Auto Claim Question -- just look how long it is, and note that each auto claim story has its own page. As a result, he now has 233 of his own articles, and 932 Content 2.0 submission articles. His website almost builds itself....

So, just thought I'd put that out there if any other Site Build It users are in the same boat as I am. I'm definitely going to pursue the C2 option now rather then set up a separate forum and spend time nurturing that. I think with the right approach to C2, the comments will grow all by themselves.

Thanks for listening!

[James81]

Originally Posted by Brutha

Lifehack.org managed to fail to build an active forum even when they had a lot of traffic.

What kind of software did they use?

For the love of God, if you start a forum, please use either:

vbulletin
phpbb

These people who have forums with funky software are...er...just no. lol

vbulletin is the best there is. phpbb is good, but you have to add modifications for it to be of good quality.

[Tristan Bull]

I think the real questions is how many active members do you need?

I would maybe let people know that you will be opening a forum and try and get a group of people who are going to post in there, you could even outsource people to make posts and threads in your forum at the start just to get it active.

But maybe launch on a particular day so you will have a burst of new members on the first day and hopefull it snowballs from there.

Cheers,
Tristan