I have two music blogs right now, about to add a third one. But two of these are in a VERY specific [but emerging] niche. And of course, people love talking about music. But should I wait to gain some readership first then come out with a forum? How would having a Wordpress blog with a vB/non-Wordpress forum work together?

I am choosing to get some readership first before committing to a forum, but would like you guys to discuss.

Get your ducks in a row

Yeah just wait. Wait till you have more content and traffic, then simply announce your forum in your blogs.

You might want to consider hiring some forum posters to get things off to a good start if you go ahead with launching a forum now.

It could work either way. You could wait till you get many visitors to your blog and then start promoting the forum, or you could start up the forum and use it to help promote the blog.

Sorry I'm not really narrowing it down, that's just how I see the 2 things you could do.

The thing with me is that I would not know how to jump start a forum, and my budget is pretty much zero, so paid posting and contests are not in the picture. Plus I would not bother putting it in my signature because I don't like to advertise my competing forum on other forums.

Unless, someone can come up with some magic formula that avoids all this.

If you don't have the budget to build some hype around the forum with something like a contest then I say wait till you can promote it with your blog.

Originally Posted by greenhams

The thing with me is that I would not know how to jump start a forum, and my budget is pretty much zero, so paid posting and contests are not in the picture. Plus I would not bother putting it in my signature because I don't like to advertise my competing forum on other forums.

Unless, someone can come up with some magic formula that avoids all this.

I see you have a blog about nerd-music/nerdcore. I know YTCracker, do you want me to see if you can get an interview with him?

I would wait until you have a little more traffic. There's no point in having a forum if it's not active. That will only allow users to see that your site is small. I would wait until you get some more activity and can easily get some conversations going on the forum.

You could always offer free incentives. What I did with theblackparade.net (which is doing very good imo) all I said is that if you were within the first 100 members and got 10 posts, they would get a free vip membership, and a free email, and exclusive content. That was enough to get it going.

Wait until you are getting 10-15 comments or more per post that you make. At that point you can make a fairly educated guess that your readers are interested in interacting with your site more.

As we talked about at the Retreat - a blog that gets one to two comments per post actaully looks *active*. A forum with that much activity looks like a ghost town. Stick to the one you can make look active before you move on to something else.

In my opinion, its never too early to start a forum. You could start it tonight and build/improve it in the background while you build readership in your blogs. If you plan it right, it will all come together really nicely. fill the forum with good posts and good discussions, make sure its active, and then advertise it

as for vb and wordpress working together, theres nothing yet other than linking to one or the other. But there are add-ons for vbulletin which allow you to have a blog interface buitin (different from wordpress though)

Hello greenhams,

I too would wait - if you start now with limited traffic, chances are, your forum will have very little to no activity. Once you get more traffic to your site and blog, you can mention the forum, which will give you a greater chance of having more activity in your forum. If there's more activity in your forum, the more of a chance your forum will take off and flourish.

I wish you good luck in creating and maintaining your new forum.

Happy Holidays, everyone, and have a happy, safe, and prosperous 2007!

Sincerely,

Joe Chengery III

its never too late to add something fresh online

long as its original and not too cheesy heh

I would also suggest that you should wait. Once you have a good readership then you can easily start the third one, which will ensure that you start with a high viewership from the start.

i didn't know there was money to be made with a forum...