New Forum, What's The Point?

[pavel]

This is a question directed to site/forum owners/creators rather than to regular visitors. During last years I saw quite a few forums that appeared from nowhere and than either died or became barely alive. I'm sure their creators didn't plan it to be this way but they probably didn't have any realistic estimations and planning from the beginning either. Will this one be different? What makes this one better than few others that survived and are around? (Please don't see this as a negative post. I truly hope that this forum may become successful and wish you luck)

Pavel

[Marc]

Hi Pavel, and I guess thanks for your honesty ... you do raise a legitimate question however.

I am the owner of Emediate Technologies (http://www.emediatetech.com), a web development and design company. We also are responsible for a number of large online communities. Our largest MEA (http://www.mobileelectronics.com.au) has over 40,000 monthly readers, followed by Tacklebox (http://www.tacklebox.com.au) and StereoNET (http://www.stereo.net.au). All are special interest groups/communities and are the result of interests / hobbies of mine. Some are profitable and setup for being commercial, others, such as this are not.

They generally come about from my frustration at the way others run their sites and as you say, the way in which the founders give up on the sites and let them fade away into the distance.

We set ourselves up within specific industy's, introducing ourselves to the companies involved in such industry's and publishing their Press Releases, News and Information. We put a lot of work in behind the scenes and work on spreading the word of each site actively. Already, we have published a flyer we are mailing out to many wholesalers / importers within the aquarium / aquaculture industry asking them to become involved in this site but also letting them know to send us their information on a regular basis for free publishing.

We also go one step further with our established sites running many activities. The largest national sound quality competition series (http://www.mobileelectronics.com.au/content.php?contentID=37) for MEA. Regular get together&#39;s (http://www.stereo.net.au/forum/index.php?showforum=43) for SNA, a national Approved Dealer Network (http://www.mobileelectronics.com.au/content.php?contentID=33) for MEA, a Pro Team (http://www.tacklebox.com.au/gallery/showphoto.php/photo/795/cat/500/ppuser/1033) fishing major competitions in Australia for Tacklebox, and so on. So as you see, it&#39;s not just a case of whacking a forum up and hoping for the best for us. We enjoy marketing and building our communities as much as each hobby itself. This is a full time gig for us. We&#39;re not students doing this in our spare time http://www.thefishtank.com.au/forum/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif

We lease a server farm in the Optus Data Centre in Brisbane with a shared load across at least 7 servers that this site and all our communities reside on.

I could go on and on but I guess time will be the biggest test of all. Hopefully, your contributions as a member of this community will play a part in the future success and support of this site? In any case, we are committed to seeing this through and it becoming a Premiere Aquarium Enthusiast Australian website. Who knows, but we&#39;ll give it our best shot in any case.

[pavel]

Thanks for the reply. The tech part now looks ok to me http://www.thefishtank.com.au/forum/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink.gif Now you need to build a good size community. I was going to suggest to add more different sub-forums (like cichlids, killi, catfish) but than thought that at this stage it may do more bad than good as forum will become too scattered. The thing I will suggest though is to add artictes page that will be a part of the web site and motivate people to contribute (don&#39;t ask me how to do this, I don&#39;t know). Another thing that comes to mind is run some kind of a newsletter/online magazine (a good example is one on reefcentral, even if they hadn&#39;t such a huge sw community the magazine alone would attract me. Actually when I think more about this reefcentral is an excellent source to learn for any new forum/web site creator).

Pavel

[Marc]

Thanks Pavel, I will look into all your suggestions.

Undoubtedly we will be adding an Articles section and encouraging contributions (incentives even). All in good time, the key is building the community up first. http://www.thefishtank.com.au/forum/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif