Its hard to make money from a forum beyond the cost of hosting – so its got to be an area you are very interested in.

What will be the initial investment? I had a look at phbb forum but I couldn’t find an option to host on my own domain, I don’t wanna host it on their free sub domain.

Just wanted to know what steps to follow… to setup up a forum on my blog which got integrated with the blog itself?

please shed some light on this.

so I have added a great little forum (Simple:Press Forum) to my WP blog now and slowly getting a few people to register but it wont reach the traffic/users as previously.

so my tip (as mentioned by other commenters) treat it seperatly from your blog/site and be ready to spend a lot of time reading it/moderating it/sorting out issues with the users or get a moderating in if you can afford it..

This is very true. I started several forums in my years and all have
been complete failures because they lacked members. Except my
new forum which has a paid membership.

It’s weird, that a paid membership forum can be a success while free
to join forums fail every day.

The difference with my new forum is that I am offering my expertise
as a consultant which means clients get me for a very low rate.

There are already hundreds/thousands of forums for socializing and
mindless chit chat.

People will pay for information and you will not need many paid
members.

just a thought,
Bompa

Starting a forum is easy, but making it take off can be hard, especially for specialized markets, for example, businessmen who source from China. Am sorry to say I gave up after some time and focused on the blog, which was more successful (the readers are quiet too, but our conversion rate is high).

@Todd, I think that the size required might actually vary depending on the niche, and on the existence of alternative forums already.

@Rajaie AlKorani, well putting the software up is not hard at all. Organizing it, moderating, and making it grow over the time is not such an easy task though. But a lot is related the popularity of the anchor website.

@Everyday Finance, no you can not host a forum inside blogger. Blogger is a blogging platform, so you can only blog there. In order to have a forum you need to have your own domain hosted on a server.

I would not suggest going with open posts also, the spam would be massive.
@Return To Manliness, the technical part is pretty easy, it is almost like installing WordPress or any other server side software. I might do a post about it in the future though.

@WhitDawg, yeah those are some good ideas to get the momentum going on the Forum.

@The Blogger Tips, vBulletin is quite good for blocking spam, I have not had any problems so far.

@Rhys – Retro Garden, yeah if the niche is pretty small and if you have some passionate readers this could work with a traffic far smaller than 5k uniques a day.

@Trevor, that should be a minor risk, and can be easily solved with a moderator.

Forums aren’t a walk in the park. They do take a lot of work to run.

I say go for it. (Right now the site gets 3,000+ uniques a day, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it if you have less)

A forum cannot create a community by itself.
A forum can only help an existing (even nascent) community talk to itself.

Matt

Oh and I’d never use phpBB. To spammy and hackable. I do recommend bbpress, which I use for the Retro Garden Forum

I feel the main key to a succesfull forum has to be the traffic you have coming to the website before hand, if you have enough traffic then give it a go.

Will.

I’m not near 5K per day, but might be able to make it work with less for a given niche.

Could also start with open posting and no registration? I presume this would introduce some spam problems, but perhaps this enables an initial kickoff period to get people to start posting, then you force the enrollment.

Interested in thoughts and more mechanics on implementation, especially if relevant to Blogger.

Thanks!

It might upset some readers, but it might also work in the long run. This is what Steve Pavlina has been doing for a while

OR perhaps if you a ongoing focused conversation across a series os posts.

How about you get everyone (as many as possible) to pre-register (regular visitors) and say launch with a minimum of 500 members ? Give the first 1000 members a better standing within the forum, a bit like how at ebaumsworld you have to pay to access some of the better forum functions ? Oh I dunno, food for thought !

One of the things I like about forums, is that after a period of time, they will run themselves.

We’ve been planning a forum over at devjargon for a while now and we’re just waiting for the traffic to rise to the point where we can justify it and sustain a forum.

If you have a successful blog, a forum is a great addition.