Starting a Forum

**mojomediaman** · 06-25-2008 10:56 AM

Hey everyone,

I recently started to develop a regional forum for cell phone enthusiasts.

MtlMobile.net - Quebec's Leading Cell Phone Community - Powered by vBulletin - Take a look and tell me what you think.

The objective now is to get relevant content on the forum.

Have any of you had success with populating forums with good content in early stages?

Are paid forum posters worth it?

If anyone has relevant services that could help our forum in any way, please let me know.

Thanks for your input.

Jonathan Kennedy
MtlMobile.net - Quebec's Leading Cell Phone Community - Powered by vBulletin
Quebec's Leading Mobile Phone Community

**mike95910** · 06-25-2008 11:16 AM

looks alright to me. maybe add some pics of the hottest new phones on the market. just a thought

**mojomediaman** · 06-25-2008 12:06 PM

Thanks for the tip. Adding images of phones is a great idea.

JK

**BrianLowell** · 06-25-2008 11:41 PM

Not bad, you can take some ideas off of my past forums if you wish (Check my signature). You need quality content, SEO optimization, and other key factors. Best of luck!

**DylanO** · 07-06-2008 06:46 PM

One suggestion: figure out something some of the biggies (howardforums.com, for example) don't do and do it. Not too familiar with telephone forums, but finding a good niche is a great way to attract users.

Dylan

**jshua** · 07-06-2008 08:19 PM

That is a great forum and i think once you find a niche you will see great potential in the site

**allysa** · 07-07-2008 03:55 AM

looks OK with me, cool and clean design. You need to attract more users. Good luck!

**Ivan** · 07-07-2008 07:21 AM

Originally Posted by mojomediaman

Take a look and tell me what you think.

It looks usable, but you should customize it a bit more toward the theme of Quebec and Montreal. Maybe some scenery specific to the area to play the emotiona side of people. Also, doing some quick keyword research for Canada, I discovered the term "mobile phone" is as popular on the SE-s as "cell phone" so you should incorporate it in your descriptions. To further the optimization, get the vBSEO plugin.

You can get a lot of ideas over at the dedicated forum community The Admin Zone.

Originally Posted by mojomediaman

Are paid forum posters worth it?

Haven't used them, but it depends on the actualy quality of the posts. If you can get good ROI, why not? There's also the option of making fake accounts yourself and doing some initial discussions.

One thing regarding the Zune contest. The banner that's announcing it looked like an ad to me. I actually had to look a bit closer to read the text - not good. Write some compelling call to action along the lines of "Participate in the Forums and Win a 4GB Zune MP3 Player".