Review: Extremely helpful- everything you want to know about starting a forum.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 10, 2013
When Facebook banned my fake account it was heartbreaking. I had created "John Doe" to argue about politics with people, had collected many like-minded friends, yet because Facebook is full of SS-style censors that report others, eventually I got kicked out for good. My best friend told me to start a forum, and that's why I picked up this book.Here you will get unique insights about picking a topic (not all topics do well), why forums get more traffic than blogs, how to become an authority on a subject, why the topic you pick up must be your passion (here's my own example, I love guns when it comes to self-defense politics but not the actual mechanics or components of guns, so if I were to create a gun blog it would be about the dangers of gun control or gun control threats or stories about self-defense but not the differences between a 9MM Smith & Wesson and a 9MM Taurus).Of course, the challenge for anyone who creates a forum is finding a unique topic, but even there you might find room for a niche or micro-niche. I like the author's example of the pitbull love forum, not only is that breed controversial (and controversy is a great traffic generator) but the owners of pitbulls are passionate about it. I love his idea of setting up Google News Alerts so you can always find out what's going on with your topic, and his principle of "We never engage in altering post content or news policies to favor advertising. We will lose an advertiser before we'll modify a somewhat negative post in their favor." Great words! As a fan of Ayn Rand I believe in trading value for value, and I can spot authenticity from falseness a mile away. I also like the advice he gave about monetizing forums, using Hostgator instead of GoDaddy (unless you're buying a domain name), whether to get free software or use vBulletin, etc. This book is a MUST for anyone thinking of starting a forum or someone that has one but isn't having a good experience.