Online message boards and BBS systems can be a great way to connect people who share similar interests. By following a few easy steps, you can create a thriving online community which will provide you and your membership with many entertaining discussions.
You can also make money online by starting your own online forum and putting adsense or affiliate ads on it.
This idea is particularly more popular in Pakistan because people like to have discussion online.
You should start thinking about starting a forum in your areas of expertise.
Here are some ideas for you
Cricket Discussion Forum
Women Discussion Forum, fashion, women problems, shopping, etc.
Political Discussions
Student Discussion forum, where students can log in and ask questions and other students can answer those.
Doctors Forum, where people can ask questions about health problems
Professionals forum, where professionals can meet and network
Business Forum, where business men can meet and share ideas
The possibilities are endless.
Once you have decided what will be topic of your forum, then next step is to build a forum.
First step is to get domain registration and hosting for you forum. For that you need to either contact your ISP or some third party hosting service.
Once you have gotten the website domain and hosting, next step is to install a free forum software.
We highly recommend PHPBB as it is free and most popular internet forum software. Seek help from some web developer or professional to help you install that.
You would also need to apply for a adsense account so that you can make money from it.
Then setup rooms in your forum and make sure to post some interesting topics on your forum.
Now is question of driving traffic to your forum. You can either use SEO or Adwords to buy traffic from google for your forum. Once you have your forum established
make sure to moderate your forum on daily basis and add new posts and reply to questions.
You will start seeing money coming in to your account through these efforts , although it may take a while.
It’s a fair point to say the online tool most responsible for the advent of social media is the forum or message board. Descendants of early bulletin board systems and USENET groups, the forum introduced the concepts of conversation and community to the Internet. As technology blossomed and more sophisticated methods of communications usurped forums as the primary place people played online, the forum seemed to take a back seat.
Perhaps the technology was ahead of its time, but millions of web users are rediscovering the forum and message board these days. According to Forrester Research, a forum or message board tops the list of what consumers want out of a media website. Perhaps this is now because savvy companies are not just offering them, but participating in them as well. How many of you had little more than occasional forum participation until Dell, Apple or some other tech company offered one? As such, more companies are considering social media retro: adding a good, old fashioned message board to their online offerings.
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2 comments:
Hi Dcetian:
Nice post - wow, that is a lot of content!
I especially like the opening sentence - “the online tool most responsible for the advent of social media is the forum or message board”.
With all the new technology and shiny objects, it is easy to overlook these communities - which from our perspective has the deepest veins of insight available for mining.
TO’B
DCETian,
Wow! Thank you so much for taking a look at the book and for the kind words. I’m thrilled that you enjoyed it. Your post makes my day. :)
Regarding that line, I can see how it can seem kind of extreme by itself, so I just wanted to explain it’s context real quick. I was talking in reference to people you’ve already banned who are now attempting to circumvent that ban. My aim was to treat everyone reading my book as a reasonable, professional person. There are people running forums who will ban people who disagree with them, as you have seen, just as there are people running blogs who delete comments and ban people that disagree with them. In the book, though, I didn’t want to talk to that person.
When you ban someone from your forums, if you follow my philosophy, they have pretty much made you do it by spitting on your guidelines and your community. And then you have a small group of people who try to evade your ban, which is not appropriate. And some of those people view an account on your site as some sort of right. So, that’s the angle I was speaking from.
Thanks again!
Patrick
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