Jumpstarting Forums and Building Community
Forums are a great way to create a niche community and keep visitors coming back to your site time and time again. Lets face it if your forum is the best forum in XYZ niche then you’ve got the best chance of getting your product or service in front of their face and instantly establishing yourself as an expert in the field. Or even advertising monetization on forums can be good if you have a specific niche to target advertisers in.
But the biggest problem with getting a forum started is a catch 22. You need forum posters to get content on your site but people only want to post on active forums that already have forum posters. So how do you get those first posters to start interacting with your site?
There are a few popular methods I’ve seen:
- Posters for Hire - these guys are the freelancers of the forum posting world. $.20 per post and they’ll go talk about whatever junk you want them to on your forum. But usually this content is not good and often times is copied from other related forums in your industry (bad news if that forum owner catches a pattern of it going on)
- Talking to yourself with multiple accounts - it sounds like a pain in the ass, and it is. You’ll start posting and questions, setting up another account, answering the questions then on another account answering the question. After a while you’ll start getting confused about who the person is your logged in as and… yeah who wants to do this exactly?
Well I’m working on a new idea that I think will be a good 3rd option.
Yahoo Answers has a free API and they allow people to scrape their content (and they don’t even require attribution, they just request it). Well what about using this? They have over 30 million answers+questions in their database. There are posts regarding anything you can imagine.
Any niche forum could be jump started by having new threads and answers pulled from Yahoo Answers on a time delay.
Most of their posts are not promotional spam in the least and yahoo monitors for abuse so using this content seems like a great solution.
I’m opening up for beta applications today at JetConvo.com. I’m only going to be accepting about 10 members for round 1 of beta. I only want testers who are serious about using the service, building a forum, and sharing their feedback and results with me - so please post in the comments section where you plan to use JetConvo and any other details about your past experience.
Version 1 of JetConvo will only work with PhpBB (probably the best and most popular free open source forum software). In the future I do plan to add Joomla, vBulletin, Invision, Drupal, and others.