How to launch a forum on your blog

Forums (or community-style content blogs based on Drupal – think ThreadWatch) are a natural extension of blogs. Once your blog has a regular following and traction in your niche, forums (reader-generated content) offer the best solution for growing your brand and the community around it.

So how do you add a forum to your blog?

There are several parts of the process that you need to take care of:

• Understanding if a forum is right for your blog
• Selecting and setting up forum software
• Integrating the forum within your blog
• Promoting the forum around launch time
• Running and managing the forum

Can your blog support a forum?

Forums are notoriously hard to launch and even harder to sustain. The Internet is littered with failed forums. Having a blog’s community be part of the initial forum community can make the launch much easier and significantly raise your forum’s chances of survival.

There’s no hard and fast rule to how big a community your blog should have before the launch – but as a rule of thumb, I’d say this:

If your blog posts get lots of comments (30+ per post) and they come from a varied source, then your blog is a good candidate for launching a forum.

However, if your blog traffic overall is low (less than 5k uniques per day – approximate number, use your own judgment here), launching a forum on the back of the blog will be a bit harder.

If your blog is growing, is stable in its traffic and “getting more readers” isn’t your primary problem, then a forum is probably the right step to take your blog to the next level and help you dominate your niche.

If in doubt, just ask someone here.

Forum software

I personally prefer bbPress (simple, integrates with WordPress (single login for both blog and forum) and is fast), but you have a choice between Vanilla, vbBulletin and phpBB (just to name a few). If you have a Drupal blog, forums are already integrated in the CMS.

There are pluses and minuses for both. See this discussion on Perf for more on different forum software.

Integrating the forum in your blog

Some tips for maximising forum exposure on your blog:

• Show latest forum threads in the sidebar (just like you would show recent comments / posts) and make this prominent.
• Promote the forum on every single post / page – how? You can add a line to your WP single post template that asks users to discuss posts in the forum. You can replace one of your ad blocks (let’s say the adblock that comes at the end of each post or the one at the top of the sidebar) with a graphic ad promoting the forum. Badges, link reminders, short posts covering forum discussions – any way you can hack it, promote the forum on your blog.
• Run a competition with the clues buried inside your forum. Chris Garrett used a modification of this to launch his blog and build feed subscriptions (he advertised a free report on flagship content only in his feed and promoted this fact everywhere – built up his feed subscriptions pretty fast too).

What other strategies can you suggest for integrating the forum in your blog (and making it a part of the ‘daily process’ your readers go through when they read your blog)?

Launch the forum

How you launch your forum will depend on the time you can invest in it and your budget. A big splash launch would include press releases, buying advertising on blogs and forums, doing an extended preview of the launch, etc etc.

However, there are still ways that you can launch a forum without too much time and a lot of money – the key is knowing what to focus on.

• I hope you have friends as bloggers in your niche – leverage relationships to help give exposure to your forum through other blogs (note, you might want to offer an incentive – an offer for their readers, perhaps). It pays to make friends though.
• Create linkbait in advance and publish them on the day the forum launches – then use the resulting attention and traffic and funnel it to the forum. It’s cheap, and requires some effort, but matched with your existing blogging community this tactic alone can give your forum the initial push it needs to survive.
• Pre-populate the forum with some posts and threads so that it’s not totally empty. One tactic is to email regular readers and co-bloggers and get them to ’start’ on the forum a day or two before the actual launch. Real posts are always better than you creating 10 different IDs and posting under them.
• Building up interest in the forum in advance is a no-brainer, but instead of putting up announcements about it run a competition and give out a prize, make the competition winnable only through the forum and then promote that prize / competition everywhere. It’s been done before, but it works.
• Got some spare cash? Pay a popular blog to cover your forum – find a proper angle to suit that blogger’s audience if necessary.

What other strategies could you use to launch a forum?

Day to day management

Deserted forums, trolls and spamming are part and parcel of any forum – and for a lot of people the extra time spent managing the forum can be a significant obstacle in setting one up.

• As much as you possibly can, give the moderating tasks to your readers.
• Set out clear guidelines before you start.
• A community is usually self-sustaining once it reaches a tipping point of members. The key is to push your forum to that point as quickly as possible, and that means a) having a big enough readership / community around your blog to start with and b) to make a big splash with your launch.

There is plenty of good advice on running a forum – and the best might be this list that I’ve referred to over a dozen times in the last year:

20 tips for communities, blogs and forums.

There are bloggers out there (Paul and Darren, I’m talking to you) whose blogs are begging for forums – these blogs are niche leaders and for them a forum is simply a continuation of their brand-building process.

You might think that having a forum is not the right move for your blog.

The question isn’t about adding a forum – the question is enhancing community value. Blog comments don’t give readers the freedom to start topics and to share their knowledge the same way that forums do.

If you’re uncomfortable about forums, break the rules of how forums are run in your niche and adapt it to your blog’s needs. Put up a stripped down forum with basic functionality (like bbPress) if you’re worried about management, maintenance or have any other excuses.

Bottom line – what are you doing to build your blog’s community?

Rethinking Blogging as a Career

After browse-reading Yaro Starak’s very informative and very free 55-page ebook Blog Profits Blueprint, the thought came to me that maybe most of us bloggers should not be expecting to experience blogging as a full-time career. Have I lost my mind? Well, I haven’t kept it a secret from people that know me that other aspects of online work have been beckoning to me lately. And despite my love of blogging, I’ve been looking into these alternatives to pad out my online activities. Maybe you should, too. Why? Well, consider the diagram labelled “Core Expectation”.

The diagram shows some of the revenue streams that the average new blogger can expect. There really isn’t much, is there? How hard do you have to work to get to the point where you can earn at least a part-time living, if not a full-time living? Yaro mentions that he now works maybe a few hours a day writing at most one post per day. Nice. He also admits it took him more than two years to get there.

Now while you have the advantage of Yaro’s advice in the ebook, not to mention all the great blogs about blogging, you still have to establish yourself, get yourself to the point where you have enough traffic to support a reasonable income. Even with all the advice you can find, it’s still going to take the average blogger a year or longer. Some will never get there. Unless you go the for-hire route that I have.

I enjoy it. I’ve been a contractor/ freelancer for a very long time and I know the highs and lows and ups and downs. But many of you probably want to work for yourself. What if we’re all looking at this blogging thing wrong? Maybe we should not expect blogging to produce the core revenue streams. Maybe there’s another way that still involves blogging.

So how could most of us earn a living online while involving blogging but not relying on “blogging” income? For an answer, have a look at the diagram labelled “Supplemental Blogging” [click to enlarge].

Each activity listed in this diagram is a verifiable online service. That is, someone somewhere on the Internet is charging for each.

So what if you shifted your whole mindset towards being service-oriented, a digital entrepreneur? Offer those services that you are skilled at, and as time allows, add to your skills.

Now, blogging serves as a supplement to your activities. It builds up your authority and reputation, and serves to sell your services. You are no longer relying on measly blog income in the early stages of your online career. You can still have a blog with advertising, but because you are selling services, you might be a bit more cautious about what ads you slap on your blog.

If you think about it, I’m not really saying anything new, just suggesting a mindshift. Darren Rowse and others have written about income earned because of blogging, not from blogs themselves. All I’m saying is that maybe more of us need to consider this option.

[Note: Diagrams inspired by David Armano's Experience Map.]

Crafting A Viral Email Message

I’ve put together a viral email message for the Harry Potter Charity Program that’s part of our Performancing experiment.

I’d really appreciate any constructive criticism so that we can hold this up as a successful model for creating legit viral email campaigns and also make our charity effort successful. Once I’ve gotten everyone’s feedback, I plan to get this ball rolling and I’ll ask all Performancing members to help out too.

Subject Line:

One Million Harry Potter Books For Charity

Message:

Hi! I’m helping raise money for charity and want your help. All you have to do is buy a Harry Potter book.

Pretty simple, huh? The only requirement is that you’ve got to buy the book by through the following website:

http://harrypotterthedeathlyhallows.net/

When you go to that site, you’ll actually be buying the book through Amazon. However, it is extremely important that you first go to the website listed so that your book purchase is counted.

With your help, we can raise over $1,000,000 for charity. For every Harry Potter book, movie or video game that is purchased through this site, they are donating $1 to charity.

If you could forward this email to at least three friends, then together we can help raise over a million dollars for charity.

$100 To The First Five Accepted pMetrics Widgets

$500 to the first “killer” widget/plugin (as determined by Ryan) developed for pMetrics

Last night, Sean announced the launch of the pMetrics API.

The API opens up whole new possibilities for interpreting and displaying blog statistics. In the spirit of moving the pMetrics community forward, we are sponsoring five $100 prizes for the first five “fun and useful” widgets to be developed.

Here are the guidelines:

1. Widgets that overlap in fundamental functionality will be competing on a first come, first serve basis
2. A “fun” widget is one that people will want to put on their blog
3. A “useful” widget is one that displays interesting information
4. Widget submissions should come with links to live demos
5. Widgets must meet our technical guidelines
6. In submitting your widget, you are giving us permission to host and distribute your widget if we choose to.

Of course, “fun” and “useful” are subjective criteria, but we think you get the point. No widget nonsense, please;-)

You should submit your widgets in the pMetrics Widget Forum. The order in which you submit your widgets is the order in which they will be evaluated.

So let the fun begin!

7 Suggestions for Making Your Blog Writing More Accessible

Those of you who have been blogging for a while have learned a thing or two about the visual aspects of blog writing. Then there’s the issue of picking the right “voice” to write in. New bloggers, on the other hand, may not have learned this yet – even when they’ve already written for print.

The problem, it appears, is that as online readers, we seem to have less patience for reading large amounts of text, especially if it’s hard to read. That covers a few aspects, including wording, grammar, sentence structure and visual density. Here are a few suggestions to get past these problems.

1. Watch the run-on sentences. Unless you’re describing dense subjects or explaining processes, long sentences are not welcome on a blog. I have a tough time describing a run-on sentence in print, but they seem so common in the blogosphere that I wonder if English teachers stopped teaching sentence structure in high school.

   I don’t want to get into a discussion about sentence fragments and such. That’s not my style or forte. If you suspect you have a run-on sentence, read it aloud. If you can’t do so without taking many breaths, you might have a run-on sentence. Then ask a friend with better grammar skills than yourself. Most blog visitors will not tell you.

2. Use visual variety. No one is going to stick around and read your blog if your paragraphs are 20 or 30 sentences long. Online text does not lend itself well to speed reading because most of it is sans serif. Unfortunately, serif fonts do not look very inviting on a computer screen. My eyes go buggy reading screens of text every day, and gigantic paragraphs don’t help.

   Make your writing visually inviting by using a variety paragraph lengths, line breaks and bullet lists. Add <h2>, <h3>, etc., headings and embolden or italicize keywords. If you use bullet lists and say “here are five reasons,” then you better number your bullets. If you don’t mention a count, plain unnumbered bullets are fine.

3. Write accessibly.
   Your level of language may be at the post-graduate level, but this is generally not a good idea for most blogs. Be inviting. Don’t force your average reader to check a dictionary every few seconds. Unless that’s what your blog is about.
4. Write cohesively.
   This is especially important for very long posts. It’s easy to meander, topically. The best way to approach a post you feel is going to be long is to start with an outline, even with a mindmap. Expand from there. Because you start with cohesion (an outline or a mindmap), you will very likely end with cohesion.
5. Use varying post lengths.
   If you post more than once per day, vary the word count of posts. Three to five giant articles daily isn’t going to gain you a lot of subscribers, unless you are providing must-have information not available elsewhere. Especially if you’re violating some of the above rules.
6. Edit ruthlessly.
   If you’ve only started writing as a blogger, and never in print, you very likely don’t even understand the editing process. If you want your writing to have impact, to reach people, edit yourself. Go back over what you wrote. Does it say what you really want it to say? Do you have variety in your sentence lengths?

   Edit both short and long posts. It’s not easy when you’re rushed for time, and I’m as guilty as anyone, but it’s a must, long-term, if you want to gain credibility for your writing.

7. Set it aside.
   We all make mistakes in our writing, but what separates the good writers from the bad is that the former revise their work from time to time. This is the reason I prefer not to post something on the same day that I wrote it. When time permits, I’ll write my next day’s posts today, or at least wait a few hours before posting.

I don’t want to give the impression that I have 100% perfect English grammar because I don’t. (I also sometimes like to violate some grammar rules for impact because that’s my fiction/ storytelling style and it’s creeped into my non-fiction writing.) Having grown up speaking in multiple languages, I find that grammar from other languages will sometimes assert itself on my English writing, no matter how hard I try. But for that very reason, I’ve always made a concerted effort to edit my writing, in hopes of improving it. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t semi-illiterate bloggers doing very well, however. So ultimately, you’ll have to decide how important the above suggestions are to you.

The pMetrics API has landed

The pMetrics API is finally here. We think you’ll like it. Nearly every piece of information you can see from the web interface can also be accessed via the API, and you can get it in XML, JSON (JavaScript), or serialized PHP formats for easy implementation in a variety of applications.

We’d really like to see some awesome widgets created by anyone who has the ability! The API should allow that fairly easily. The plan is to have a page listing all the widgets created ‘officially’ by us as well as community contributed ones, and anyone will be able to grab them to place on their own site, or use one our upcoming fully customizable dashboard.

Let’s see some creativity, people!

5 Surefire Steps To Increase Readership 300% (or more)

As they say in dieting, these should be lifestyle changes; not just short-term quick-fixes.

If you’re like the average blogger then you live in a bubble. You are content to just write posts on a consistent basis and you feel as if the world is watching your every move. Think again. Chances are that you’re being ignored. So how can you change this state of affairs?

Below I list five surefire steps that will get you noticed, get you traffic, and ultimately make you some money. These aren’t easy to implement, and if you’re lazy like me, they probably seem daunting. But just like there’s no easy way to lose weight, there’s just no easy way to get and keep readers for your blog. Make a lifestyle change now, and the benefits will start compounding like a snowball rolling down a hill.
[Read more]

Is your Blog a Shop or a Billboard?

Is your blog whoring out for 5 cent clicks? When it come to making money from blogs, the easiest option seems to be to put advertising on it. AdSense, TLA, Chitika, paid reviews and other advertising gimmicks go a long way towards feeding the bloggers’ need to make money.

It isn’t the only way to make money though – and as a fellow blogger recently commented, there are serious advantages in considering your blog to be a shop rather than a billboard.

This is NOT a rant against blog advertising. Unlike some purists who feel that blogs should not have any advertising (the reasons behind that are food for a whole different discussion), I believe that advertising revenue is convenient for a blogger who is short on resources and wants to make money from his hobby (or passion).

However, if advertising is all you’re focusing on for revenues as a blogger, you’re missing out on a significant amount of income.

Selling Advertising vs Selling Products

What does it mean for a blog to be a shop rather than a billboard?

As a rule of thumb, the ‘billboard’ approach means that you are driving leads to someone else’s business and you get paid a commission for doing so. In other words, you get paid for sending people away from your website.

The ’shop’ approach allows you to make money from your visitors directly, and as such requires a different approach in design and blogging (your blog design would now be optimized to highlight the product you are selling and if you shun advertising revenue completely, then you have plenty of space on your blog for not only promoting your products but also promoting your site’s content in prominent locations on your blog.

There are pros and cons for each approach:

Advertising is easy to start off with but if you want to make serious money from it you’ll have to work hard to increase traffic and to attract the big advertisers. There’s also the trade-off between space for content and space for ads.

Selling products requires a lot of work in the beginning (getting the product and sales text and graphics ready – although if you outsource everything and you have the money for it (through advertising, maybe?) then it’s easier) and setting up the sales process takes some level of knowledge / expertise. On the other hand, once you get going and automate the whole process (from bringing in leads to converting them to pitching the back-end products to them, selling products will make you far more money than just advertising.

It’s been said here on Performancing before – if you make your ads the content – if everything you write promotes and sells your products (implicitly), then you’ve got an almost perfect business model.

The Relaunched Blog-Tutorials.com: Back to the Basics

Last month, Splashpress Media (the parent outfit of Performancing) revealed a re-energized Blog-Tutorials.com. While Performancing is the place to go for your regular dose of professional/advanced blogging tips, Blog-Tutorials takes us back to the basics. Definitely useful for beginners; that’s not to say that veterans won’t pick up new things from the blog!

Here’s an appetizer of some sorts, a quick list of several Blog-Tutorials posts that you might find helpful:

• Make Yourself Found! (Or, Promote Your Site Web 2.0-Style) — “The idea: step out of your blogging space and find sites that let you link to your blog, posts and all. Consider this a very natural way of optimizing your online presence and socializing around the Web.”
• Two Design Tactics To Improve Your Blog Income — “What’s the workaround? One way is to use Google’s own image ads beside beside text ads. For instance, you can use Google’s Firefox Ad beside Google text ads as follows…”
• When Not to Blog, Part 1 & Part 2 — “Breathe first before you write. You might be aiming to be the first to get the story out, but really, what are the chances of that happening if it’s a popular event?…Better to come up with an excellent and complete post. Remember, the excitement over the event will not die down for the next few days and people will still be on the lookout for posts, so you can afford to trade 1-2 hours for a comprehensive article.”
• Make Your Blog Posts Readable — “The key idea here is to divide your paragraphs and sentences into easily digestible chunks. Second, HTML is your friend: I’ll be mentioning several tags you can put to good use.”
• Protect Important Folders in your Blog — “Here’s how it works: we should not allow sensitive directories on our blogs to list their contents publicly. We do not want malicious visitors getting any hints on how they can compromise our websites. We should not let search engines list irrelevant folders in their results.”

Blogger Hangups #1 – Hoarding Readers

Are you afraid of sending readers away from your website?

As a blog consultant, I’ve come across many fellow bloggers and site owners who refuse to link out to other blogs / websites because they believe that ‘you should not send readers away from your website’.

Now I’m not saying that you should drive people off your blog by plastering links all over it. If your blog is a quality resource, people will read it, like it and come back to it.

But not linking out under the pretext of not wanting to send readers away is stupid, and ranks just below that crazy lady who threatened to sue people for linking to her website.

And under the right conditions, it’s good value for your readers if you link out to other blogs and blog posts from time to time.

My view on this is that on blog or website cannot possibly contain ALL information that a person wishes to share with his readers. It’s not a scalable option and frankly, after a certain point the amount of information you have to deal with makes this approach impossible.

So there are two things you can do:

• You can either limit what information you provide to your readers or
• You can link out to other blogs and resources that offer additional information

At the end of the day, if you are hoarding readers you’re operating under a negative mindset and you’ll be limiting yourself in terms of how much value you can provide through your blog to your readers.

Let’s face it, your readers are not blindly loyal – they are going to go to other sources regardless of whether you link to them or not.

The challenge is not to prevent readers from leaving your blog. They will do so, no matter what you do.

The challenge is to make your blog so good that even after leaving it, readers will come back for more. Part of the process in making your blog kick ass is to offer as much value through it as you possibly can.

The only way it’s possible to do that is to link to other quality articles and websites.