I maintain a computers and technology website, and am considering the addition of a forum to the mix. Before I dive in, there are a few answers I'm seeking.

The site focuses on how-to articles related to common computer questions. The target audience is the average computer user seeking help. Numbers are low in comparison to other long-established sites, but month-to-month growth is fairly significant (after being neglected over last summer). The site has ~350 RSS subscribers, and draws 1200 uniques/1600 page views per day. Monthly revenue is in the $200 - $250 range. It was launched in March, 2006.

I am considering adding a forum to the site, but I have two questions about doing so:

1. Is it too early to start a forum?
2. If not, how will the forum contribute to the site as a whole?

Question 1: is it too early to start a forum? In my mind, I do not have enough traffic to be leveraged towards the success of the forum. Am I wrong? I don't want to host a stagnant forum that might have a detrimental impact on the image of the rest of the site.

Does this matter? Could I be just as successful building from scratch as I could leveraging significant, established traffic on the forum?

If I were to start the forum now, due to my low traffic, I would probably build it up for some time and then officially launch it after I'm happy with the amount of activity going on. Perhaps I could reach out to my RSS subscribers, giving them all "insider access" to the forum before it's official launch.

Question 2: how will the forum contribute to the site as a whole? I'd like to make the forum very valuable to site readers by tightly integrating it with the rest of the site instead of just having it as an "addition". Promoted and built up in the right way, will making the forum successful boost up the site as a whole, bringing more readers?

So there it is - I've asked two questions, and I've answered them myself. Am I right? What do you think? What would you do if you were in my situation?

Q1. I think you can start the forum now. There are both sides to it. If you wait for more traffic to flow in then there are chance that those who are there might be looking for a forum.

Q2. There are various sites which have developed a forum and have been benefited from it. So you can start a forum and target to have quality posts there.

My website started out as static content for the first year. It was only after I had established a rather sizeable return traffic pattern that I launched a forum. The forum has kept the website growing as a rather steady pace, making sure the traffic returns and adds even more to the content.

If maintaining it becomes a problem for you - which if you have a good group of poeple - it won't be as bad as it could be - there are different places you can hire a forum moderator full time for about $600/month.