How to achieve huge member base & high participation rate

Forums with huge member base & high participation rate

Any individual who tries to start and grow an online web forum community has just a tiny chance of succeeding. That's because there is so much marketing work and initial empty content that a single person cannot bring about the combined results simultaneously enough to produce a conducive environment to attract new members. In order to "get the ball rolling", your forum must contain interesting content, instant responses and also good marketing. Of course, one could implement additional features such as live discussions chat rooms and interview transcripts of iconic figures. The problem gets even tougher if you are planning to take on a forum topic that has tens of other competitors. Imagine trying to lift an entire car up by yourself. Can you succeed ? It is next to impossible, if you ask me. Now what if 15 people were to combine forces to lift the car up together ? You know what the results will be, and I'm sure that you can see where I'm getting to. From my point of view, success can be achieved much easier and faster if the same 15 people work together to lift up car by car, then each one trying to lift up a car all by himself.

Some of us are lucky to have seriously dedicated friends or relatives who share the same passion and interest to work together on starting a forum. For the rest of us, it's starting out solo, and hoping to gradually recruit moderators. But there is where the difficulty lies. It takes time to pick out the right people, to train them and good moderators are recruited only months after you've set your forum up. What you really need to achieve huge forum success with a startup bang is to have joint efforts from the beginning. Not a few months down the road and definitely not a year or two later. It'd simply take too long. What if you could immediately find the right people to work together with, and as a team, succeed at building a forum with a huge member base and high participation rate ? If you would take the time to visit ForumBuilder.net (http://www.forumbuilder.net), they have implemented a joint effort system whereby forum owners from all over the internet team up and work together. You must realize that the time for individual projects are over. Success will be more certain and can be achieved much sooner and easier only with team work.

I'm not sure about the wisdom of this approach, frankly. The flaw is that the forum becomes a committee effort with all of the pros and cons that go along with any committee.

I was until recently part of a group that launched a webmaster forum. It started well and seemed to do well for the first few months. I think we did it right in that the group was carefully selected to be compatible (or at least so we believed). But the problem was that every decision took ridiculously long to make because everyone had to have his say before a conclusion could be reached. Even minor issues like whether to allow smilies or what kind of avatars were acceptable became drawn out debates.

I launched my Psychlinks Forum (an individual project) a month after that webmaster forum. My forum is now approaching 3000 members (even after pruning zero post members) after about 2 and a half years. The "committee" forum had about 600 members last time I looked (I'm no longer an active member there).

It was a great plan, we thought. In retrospect, I'm reminded of the quote by Sir Barnett Cocks:

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which good ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.

Hi Minstrel,
Hasn't society progress by learning from their mistakes ? If we already know the difficulty exists, and if we can have a way of avoiding it, why not ? You actually mentioned that your mistake was caused by the lengthy decisions, that every member of the group was involved in. Suppose that these decision making process can be overcome somehow, by a majority vote, perhaps through a poll. Or perhaps that certain important decisions were left to a few decision makers only, and the group effort was focussed on other things, such as marketing, and link building. What matters is that the end profits are divided in a fair manner.
Also, regarding the numbers of members which you gave, they could have been the result of marketing strategy, topic of interest, competition, etc and not necessarily due to the decision to work together as a group.
I was basing the idea of team work on every example in the world, for instance, a huge company such as daimler chrysler could never achieve their status with just a single worker. As a company, they worked together, pooling various skills and talents and got to where they are now.
It's only a matter of ironing out the struggles ( politics in a big company ). Sorry to having disagree with you on this, Minstrel, but my opinion wasn't swayed by the argument you gave.

Hasn't society progress by learning from their mistakes ? If we already know the difficulty exists, and if we can have a way of avoiding it, why not ? You actually mentioned that your mistake was caused by the lengthy decisions, that every member of the group was involved in. Suppose that these decision making process can be overcome somehow, by a majority vote, perhaps through a poll.
That's exactly how we set it up - it still took forever.

Or perhaps that certain important decisions were left to a few decision makers only, and the group effort was focussed on other things, such as marketing, and link building. What matters is that the end profits are divided in a fair manner.
That was version 2. That led to those peope who weren't in the small "decision maker" group feeling like they were second tier, no longer equal partners.

All I can tell you is that it took me over two years to give up on that model and there is absolutely no way I would ever do it again.