The Death Of A Forum, The Rise Of Paid Posting
It’s officially been taken offline. Yep we’ve probably all seen it coming – the Blogtrepreneur Forums are no more. There simply weren’t enough active posters and it wasn’t worth keeping a spammified space associated with my blog, not good for business.
But, I have learnt a lot with dealing with my forum and it is this which I will carry with me as I progress with my internet businesses:
1) You need to leverage to succeed - The rises of Steve Pavlina’s and Techcrunch’s forums tell us that you need to have a suitable backdrop to launch the community on if you want quick and instantaneous rewards. Both those sites had highly reputable blogs behind them, both of which had hoards of daily traffic, RSS subscribers and WOM (Word of Mouth), which helped to fuel the forum fire.
2) You need time to moderate, post… - At first, I thought that owning a forum would be a piece of cake. I would only need 5 minutes to set everything up and that would be that. Wrong. Forums are precious and require constant care and attention. Moderation is a must if you don’t want to be inundated with obscene posts and posting is the only way the Search Engines can find you. It’s an unfortunate Catch 22.
3) You need decent software to help you – Never again will I run with phpBB. The administration section just really isn’t advanced enough and what I found most annoying was that you had to go into your hosting and mess around with SQL to delete the spammy users. It was to much hassle for such a little job and hence I let the spammers sit. Next time its gonna be VBulletin as that’s the only one I know to be excellent. But this brings me onto my next point.
4) You need to spend money to make money – Sometimes, the only way you can diversify your income and add another property to your internet portfolio is to spend a little cash and invest. Do some research and justify your spending by all means, but paying for forum software registration or domain names or larger bandwidth allocations may just help get your forum off the ground. Or you could splash out on some new posters to help get your forum on its feet.
Yes, you heard me correctly. For once, I think the ReviewMe / PayPerPost fanatics have something to cheer about. Paid posting on forums is a reality and a seemingly good one at that. Let’s use an example here in my mate Andreas’ site GetaCommunity. All you need to do if you want to boost the content is to head over there and choose a package. This of course depends on how generous you want to be – and Andreas can even give you a custom quote for those extra large wads of cash.
What’s more the service is inexpensive compared to its competitors (at just $0.26 per post for smaller packages), you’re promised “quality and educated posts” as the owner and it’s quick and easy to pay with Paypal.
Andreas doesn’t stop there though. In fact if you can’t be bothered to do any of the setting up, installation, research into domains etc – you don’t have to. GetaCommunity offers full Forum Installation, FREE Forum Hosting and for the ultra lazy people on this planet - the man even offers to do all the legwork for you in one package - prices for this are given based on the scale of the task and the eventual size you want it to reach.
Will this service ever catch on?
There will be critics - no doubt. Noone seems to get away anything in the vast blogosphere which has developed today and why should GetaCommunity be any exception? Andreas himself has told me regularly that business is good with the site and that his customer base is widening day by day. I hypothesize a surge in users wanting to pay for such a service. Heck if I had known about it, I might have considered the same thing for the Blogtrepreneur Forums!
With the amount of forums, blogs, websites and gaming domains disappearing of the face off the internet due to an unmatchable amount of competition, people will give in and revert to money to help them on the seemingly unscalable task. It’s a shame that grit and determination can’t prevail but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Note: This post was in part sponsored and in the other part contained real life information about the death of my beautiful and regrettably unsavable forum - RIP.
Hi, just wanted to let you know that one of the links to GetACommunity has a typo in it (the first one).
Anyway, thanks for a great blog!
Thanks for pointing that out Nenad and sorry to the readers who went to the wrong site.
More importantly sorry Andreas :(.
I’d never use phpBB again either, not only are the administration facilities terrible but there’s no real built-in anti-spam protection. I can’t believe that they haven’t added this sort of feature yet, but as a result I’m writing my own forum system to replace the existing one at Rogue Students, not because I want to (it’s an awful lot of work) but because there’s no free software out there that seems to do what I want.
The spam is the main thing that gets to me. Im just bothered that you can’t ban someone from your boards without having to open up Sql.
Actually I would really love to test out your new forum software because I miss having a forum to moderate
I’m not sure if you’ll be able to test my forum software, it will be quite tied in to the rest of the site because one of the things I’ve been looking for is integration with other features. If I have time at some point though I would like to start an open source forum project that would be easily extensible and which would integrate with other software easily.
Very darn true, Adnan. Managing a forum is really tough. Until the SEO kicks in and SE visitors start finding your site, it’s really difficult to get going.
I’m using VBullettin for my blogging forum (http://forum.easywordpress.com) and it has worked out very well for me. I heard about the PHPBB stuff before I decided on the forum software to use.
I’ve considered forum posters but I’m just not sure what type of content to expect, and if it’s actually posted by a human being or a bot.
Paul - OK never mind, but maybe if you have time, an open-source project could really help boost your online recognition and who knows - it could take off!
Gobala thanks for joining us - yeah the SEO is an important one in forums. Whilst blogs can still have browsing readers and loyal subscribers, forums only can kick off truly when the power of Google comes to the fore. But most forums don’t ever get to ranking highly.
I would love to use VBulletin but just can’t justify the expense. Maybe when my online earnings reach a certain level.
I totally agree with you on the first point here. Taking the example of DigitalPoint Forums, a very popular webmaster forum, the website already had a strong user base who were using the free SEO tools the website had to offer. When the forums were launched, they immediately became a success because the website already had a strong user base.