When starting an online community it’s often debatable whether you should go alone or go in with a team of staff ready to work.  So to help you make up your mind I am going to list advantages of both sides to whether it’s better to go alone or with a team.

Starting a Forum Alone

1. You don’t need to pay staff. This will keep you out of the red at the beginning.  When a forum is first created it will be difficult if not impossible to bring in the big bucks straight away so this would mean you would have to pay your super moderators and co-admins out of your own pocket.
2. You don’t need to share profits. When you decide to monetize your forum you will not need to share any profits with anyone since you don’t have any staff to share it with.
3. It will be completely your forum.  You don’t need to listen to any input from any other staff because there is none.  This will mean the forum is entirely yours and will be the way you want it.  Whether that be the forum skin or the amount of forums and sub-forums you have, it’s totally up to you.

Starting a Forum with a Team

1. You don’t have to do all the promotion yourself.  Promoting your board is a long and daunting task.  But you have to do it in order to receive the traffic and activity for your forum.  It can be very hard work and it’s the most common killer for forum admins and that’s why important to have a few people taking up that job.
2. You you don’t have to pay the full hosting and maintenance costs.  You will not have to pay the full hosting cost of the forum.  As well as the domain name or any forum licence you may purchase. With a co-admin you can share expenses if you are willing to agree to share the profits.
3. Let others keep your board clean while you focus on other tasks. Have moderators clean your board while you can focus on other things such as driving traffic to your forum, server maintenance and community management.  Saying that there might not be many posts when your forum starts so you could be wasting your money and time as the moderators will have nothing to clean up.
4. An active forum team will create and active forum.  If you have moderators and admins posting regularly it will create a sense of activity on the forum and that’s what new visitors look for when joining a forum,  activity.  This could potentially increase your visitor to member ratio.

We can all see the benefits from going alone or starting a team.  There is no real loser in this situation so the choice is totally up to you and how you administrate. I have started a forum in both situations and slightly favor going with a team due to the ability of creating an active atmosphere around the board.

What’s Your Say?

Do prefer to start a forum alone or with a team?  Do you know any other advantages for starting a forum alone or with a premade team?  Post a comment below I would love to hear them.

In my earlier posts I have mainly targeted existing forum administrators who already have their forum created and running. In this post I am going to explain to new administrators how to create a forum.

There are three things you need to carry out this task of creating a forum:

• Web Hosting
• A Domain Name
• Forum Software

Web Hosting

We need to find a home for our forum. Think of a forum as a shop. For a shop to exist it needs a place in a mall. In internet terms our web host is our place in the mall. A web host allows you to store your files online which then in turn can be viewed by the internet. We need a web host to store our forum files. I recommend HostGator, I have used them for years and they even host this Blog! I am really confident in them.

A Domain Name

A domain name is basically an address. If people want to find you they type your address in a browser and bam, they are at your site. Buying a custom domain is really cheap and very effective. If you were to host your forum on a free web hosting service you would not get half the traffic you would if you had a custom domain. You should a select a domain that relates to your forum’s theme. For example, if I had a building website I would not chose cars.com for my domain, I would chose builders.com or something along those lines. For purchasing a domain I would go to NameCheap they are very reliable.  To point your NameCheap domain towards your HostGator account check out this post.

Forum Software

There are many forum software available. They range from free to $195. The pricier does not always mean better. vBulletin is the most expensive coming in at $195. It is a great piece of software but can be very intimidating for new forum administrators. I would recommend either choosing MyBB or PHPBB3 to start off your forum and to build experience before purchasing vBulletin. MyBB and PHPBB3 are both free and have very comfortable admin panels so they are very good for beginner administrators.

Installing Your Software

Installing your forum software is very easy. See you forum software’s manual for specifics but it’s more or less uploading the forum package into the root directory and locating the install file and then running it. It could be made easier by installing the software via Fantastico. Fantasitco installs cms, blog and forum software with just a few clicks and can be found in your HostGator cPanel.

What’s Next?

Check out another one of my posts which share five tips to starting your board which could make gaining an active member base that bit easier. Leave a comment and share you experiences of starting up your board.

All the Best,
Glen

Running a Successful Forum!