The one year anniversary of KickstarterForum.org was on April 20, 2014. It’s hard to believe it’s been a year. I’ve never built a forum community before, and it’s pretty cool looking back to know that 1: people have made genuine connections through the community and 2: we’ve helped people with their dreams!

For other entrepreneurs thinking of starting a forum, social media group, or meetup group, I wanted to give some tips and tidbits I’ve learned from running KickstarterForum.org this past year and growing it to over 30k pageviews a month. Before I dive in, check out the stats below for the past year.

The image above shows the user registration stats for the board. Average of 5.21 users per day, 4.29 new topics per day, and 18.10 posts per day. In one year, we’ve managed to attract 1,928 users who have made 6,693 posts.

The graph above shows unique visitor growth over the year. It’s a pretty steady linear trend.

The graph above shows unique user growth from organic search traffic.

Are Forums Dead?

Clearly not. Some people say forums had a place at the start of the web, but now are taken over by LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, and Google+ groups. I do not agree.

I do think that poorly designed forums are an eyesore and make some users skeptical, which is why we’ve invested in an awesome design for KickstarterForum.org.

We do also have a LinkedIn group and Google+ group, but personally, I love forum communities for the following 5 reasons:

1. You can customize the layout and functionality.

Don’t underestimate this! You can reward certain users, make exclusive parts of the forum, and also easily integrate in advertisements or promotions.

2. Your efforts have longterm SEO benefits. 

I like building assets. I don’t want to be working for anyone else building their assets (unless I like the person). If you’re running a LinkedIn group, you are helping LinkedIn keep people engaged on their platform and LinkedIn can then serve them ads.

Yes, there are some google results going to LinkedIn, but no where in comparison to the amount of google results I see from forum posts in my search research.

If you’re running a forum community, all your hard work will end up leading to increased SEO traffic, inbound links, and a higher overall profile. To me, it’s a no-brainer. You also have 100% say. If LinkedIn decides to throw away the polling functionality, you have no say. With your own forum, you have complete control over the environment.

I do think it’s true that the benefits of owning a larger Google+ group are going up. Since Google+ has made links from their social network (and I believe others?) do-follow, link weight can be passed via Google+ groups. If, as the owner of the group, your posts have more of a tendency to be re-shared and commented on, this has positive SEO benefits when you plug your website.

3. You have access to user emails.

Should you ever like to give an update on a new product launch or reach out to a specific member, you have direct access to user emails. This is both beneficial and comes with a lot of responsibility. I’m always building my lists and social media groups do not come with this benefit.

4. It is a sellable asset.

Did you hear that WarriorForum was recently purchased by Freelancer for $3.2 million? Check out a snippet of the press release below.

To be honest, I’m not sure if people that run social media groups on LinkedIn actually own the groups or if LinkedIn owns the group. Something to look into! I’m also not sure if it’s legal to sell sponsorship space for your social media group if you don’t technically own it. Food for thought.

5. Better analytics.

Though some social media platforms are building in analytics for social media groups, I think google analytics is still by far the best resources for gathering data about what your users like, don’t like, and how you can improve the experience for them.

How can you build up a forum community?

In my opinion, forums and blogs are very similar. In the same way that a blog with good content naturally has an audience that begins to form in the comments section, so do forums. The main difference is that there are multiple people generating the content.

1. Think longterm – It takes a while to build up a community of repeat users and library of useful content. Spending a moderate amount of time on my forum, it’s taken me a year just to get to this point. I take a longterm view with most things I do – I expect this to be a project that continues to grow 2/3 years down the road.

2. Be useful consistently – People come to forums to 1: Have questions answered 2: Promote their business. It’s a huge time commitment to be useful consistently 365 days a year, but it’s a 100% necessity.

3. Bring in experts – Experts are a great way to shake up the typical forum discussions and often times lead to great advice, interaction, and can even inspire your users to take actions.

4. Study the competition – I do this all the time. You have to be on top of your game. Look at other communities that have formed around topics (blogs, Reddit, social media groups, other forums). What are they doing well? What varieties of content do they use to engage users? Never stop studying.

5. Reward Users – Make a Great Experience – You should go out of your way to reward users who contribute meaningful content to your forum and interact consistently. This could include: access to exclusive content, promotion, badges, etc.

6. Curate! – Everyone seems to think that more users in a discussion is better. I disagree. Good discussion comes from engaged and helpful users. I’d rather turn away users who will not contribute to the community than include them.

7. Make Other People Sucessful – With my forum, at the end of the day, my goal is to make other people successful. By making other people successful, you in time, will be successful. I try to do this by encouraging users to learn from others users, bringing in experts, doing free promotion for their business, and more.

8. Secret tips: If you’d like more specific tips as to how to build a community, shoot me an email and include “Entrepreneur” in the subject line: sbriggman@crowdcrux.com

How do you monetize?

I don’t think forums should be built to “get rich quick”. It takes years. I see them inline with other forms of content marketing for your services or products.

Ads are a simple way to generate enough money to cover the fixed costs of running the forum, but most of the cost will be human labor, whether it’s your own or the services of a moderator.

I highly recommend building the community yourself starting off. I’m more into the whole idea of “building your own tribe” through content marketing so that you can continue to solve their problems with products down the road. In my opinion, interacting daily through a forum is the best way to get to know your potential customers.

Closing Thoughts

None of these tips would be credible without the amazing support of the community at KickstarterForum.org. Reading through some of their aspirations and passion projects gives me goosebumps. It’s so inspiring to see awesome people committed to creating things and changing the world. It’s our mission to help them along the way!