freelance writing

Running Your Own Forum

Posted on November 11, 2007
Category: Uncategorized | 3 Comments

It’s a good idea to create and run your own forum and then use that forum to attract traffic to your website and/or blog. I’ve been running my own forum at The Honest Way for several months now and it works very well. Visitors to the forum read all the posts by the members (that includes the author, me!), who have links in their signatures back to their sites/blogs, which are of course set up to make money!.

It’s a rather long term venture, so you’ll need plenty of patience and determination to stick with it in order to see good results.

The major downside to running a forum is spammers! They soon get to hear about your forum and will begin signing up as bogus members. This starts as a small trickle which is quite manageable. I tend to log into my forum as admin every day and check the profile of each new member because it’s a sad fact that most of them are spammers. Then I simply delete the links they add to their profiles and ban their use ids so that they can’t post anything in the forum itself.

That’s great when there is only that trickle of new members, for instance one or two a day. Unfortunately I found that when the membership exceeded 500, that trickle gained momentum and some days I was starting to see upwards of 20 new spammer sign-ups. That pushes the member numbers up quickly – and a lot of potential real sign-ups look for forums with large memberships to join. It’s only human nature to want to join a forum that can be seen to have lots of members because the belief is that the more members there are, the more people they’ll meet and the more networking they can do. For that reason, you have to allow the spammers in. As long as you ban them as soon as they join and make sure you remove the links they add in their profiles so the search engines don’t notice them.

All the major search engines spider my forum several times each day. That’s good for the website in general because it means the site is also spidered just as often. That’s good for me because it means the SE’s see all of the new content I continually add to that site every day. This can only be good news for retaining a good PR and hopefully improving on it.

So if you’re up for a challenge and you don’t mind some work in maintaining it, running your own forum will increase the traffic to your site/blog, get you spidered by the SE’s regularly and the best bit – make money for you!

Terry Didcott

PS: Alexa today: 664,468

Comments

3 Responses to “Running Your Own Forum”

  1. Writer Paul on January 7th, 2008 2:59 pm

    Hello there Freedom Writer man. I like this writing blog of yours and I also like your freedom writer’s style. Writing is a difficult thing to do if you’re not all that interested in it, although I realize that it is so important for website and blog. Freedom writer you may call yourself, and freedom writer you may be. But I enjoy reading your writings nevertheless, so thank you and please keep the posts comiong!

  2. Opeflalia on January 9th, 2008 11:35 am

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  3. Movie on March 15th, 2008 12:48 pm

    Freedom writers

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