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Today i will start a series of posts about creating a forum. This is probably one of the long waited posts some bloggervenue readers wanted to see here.

I have more than 4 years of experience on creating and managing forums. During these years i have made many mistakes, i have learned many things almost by myself with trial and error. So im very comfortable with this subject and i hope to be able to share in an easy way, what i have learned in these four years.

First, let me clarify that the “Creating a forum” series will be only for standalone forums.

Standalone forums is an expression i use to define forums that are not integrated inside a website, that uses for example a CMS (content management system) like e107, joomla or mambo.

The model, that will serve as an example will be an established forum (dahh.net), which is a portuguese community, so you would probably want to see the translated version.

Now that the introduction has been done is time to focus on what do we want to use?

First, you need hosting, obviously, and secondly, you need a software compatible with hosting. So, to keep things simple, we will narrow our options to hosting with php capabilities and mysql driven database. Luckily, the best forums software out there use php and mysql (like 90% of the rest of the sites :p)

Things you need to know about hosting:

If you have hosting that meets the requirements mentioned above then you almost don’t need to read this.

If you don’t have, then i would recommend you to get a hosting package with at least 100 mb space and 5gb of bandwidth. This is pretty basic but you don’t need much in the beginning. Off course, in mid to long run, a hosting package with lots of space and bandwidth in a powerful server is advisable. I remember i started dahh.net in a 35mb hosting with 3gb of bandwidth lol.

I could recommend you a bunch of  hosting deals, but im sticking with one, that is by far recognized as one of the best if not the best hosting company at the moment: Hostgator.

Ironically, i don’t use them, because i have a contract with a portuguese company and im very happy with it so far

Choosing the right forum software:

Choosing a software for me it is an easy decision. There are only 3 forum scripts that i accept to use, and only one of them is free.

1st option: Vbulletin - One of the most used forum scripts in the world. It costs $100 for 1 year license. This is a powerful script, fully developed and with a strong community supporting it. I have only used it as a forum member and never as a owner. The price it costs won’t tempt me to buy it, specially when there are better options (free)

2nd option: Invision power board -  This was my favourite, until version 2.0 came out. It went commercial, and now you need $149 to buy it! Despite that, this is a great software. One of the most stable around and more appealing with an excellent community that constantly develops new skins and mods to use. The last free version released was 1.3.1 final, and it can still be used as long you have it on your pc (or just ask for a friend that have it :p)

3rd option: Simple Machines - This is the script we are going to use. It is free and in my honest opinion is by far the best forum script around. Why? Here are a few reasons:

1. Free!
2. 5 stars active and developing community;
3. lots of modifications and themes to choose;
4. Package system, meaning you can upload modifications and used them with a simple click;
5. easy to use;
6. professional team of programmers: the software is being developed by a professional team that work for Simple Machines LLC

Now, that we have hosting and a forum software to use lets head on to:

Choosing a niche for the forum:

Dahh.net is a general forum and it doesn’t specialize in anything. I created it because i wanted an easy way to share with my friends all the fun stuff i received on my email, while discussing important topics of the world.

As any other site, i advise you to choose a topic that you like, or a topic that you feel confortable talking about. You can do some keyword research, but just remember that any topic you choose, it will require a lot of work on your part.

Unless, you have wonderful marketing capabilities, lots of money to spend in advertising and lots of friends, i would advise you to stay away from these niches:

- Tech Forums

- Warez

- Porn/Erotic forums

- General Forums

- Make Money Online Forums (obviously)

- Blogging forums

After you decided on the type of forum you want, you need to choose a domain name accordingly, preferably brandable. Take my forum example. I choose dahh because one of the strong points of the forum is the funny video and images categories.

I have just covered the first part, which is the very basic stuff need to establish a forum. I recommend you to subscribe my RSS feed to keep track of the following posts.

Popularity: 40% [?]

Usfreeads is a site that allows it’s members to get free classified ads, and has been around for 9 years now, and  i have seen tremendous buzz about it around the web since i started blogging, which was over a year now.

The buzz about usfreeads is how it will help a common user to make money placing classified ads. It seems that thousands of users are taking advantage of the supposed benevolent way google looks towards usfreeads pages. It seems, that a well written ad  will most likely to perform well on google search ranking. You can look around and you will see that many “praise the gods” and “worship” the service provided by them.

Well to me, all that is a bunch of crap even if it is true (don’t take me wrong :p). The only thing the reviews made me do is to try it out for myself. Check the results of my experiences (yes another experience) and see if a common guy, with no special skills like me can make something positive out of this. So about 3 months ago a registered for a free account to give it a try round.

Ok, the first obstacle i found was the free account. It totally sucked. You were only allowed to make 2 ads, with no html, images or links to the product you want to sell!!! Point being: They want you to buy a premium membership. So free ads my ass (pardon my french lol).

I even bother to try and write an ad with this circunstances. Total waste of time, it wouldn’t bring me nothing extraordinary and in the end it was rejected. So i left my account getting dust until i could get some time to experiment. So today i subscribed the premium membership with one week free trial. After that, it will be $9.99/month.There is also a gold membership for only $10/year but to say the truth, if you see what premium gives and what gold gives, you will choose premium.

Ok, the tools are set, and i just need to choose some products and write some ads. I think my experiment will last a month, probably more and the success or failure will depend on the amount of ads i write, the quality of them and off course on how good usfreeads perfoms on delivering targeted traffic.

So the experiment will involve two types of money making programs:

1- My newest Bans Store. One that i have put more time to develop and the first one that i can call a real store. The other one were just “experiments” lol;

2- Affiliate programs from several CPA ad networks.

Now, do you want to try for yourself? Then just join Usfreeads and get a premium membership and i invite you to share your experiense here. (yes is is an affiliate link, im weak lol)

IF you want to see where this goes then subscribe my rss feed to keep easier to track the evolution process.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Well, i as a future nurse have the duty to do health educative sessions and take the opportunity to elucidade the population about certain isues. Today, i found a web site that talks about Sudden Cardiac Arrest.

This site gives you a simple and valuable information about this subject. There are 2 videos available: sudden cardiac arrest video and the human heart.

Sudden Cardiac arrest is very common unfortunately, and all population in general should be aware of risk factors, know to recognize a cardiac arrest and what mesures to take.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Having your site reviewed may point you into someting that should be improved. I got my blog reviewed a few months ago by several bloggers and they all said that one of the weakest elements of my blog was brandability. This blog lacked a good logo to show off. The previous one was awful. I was aware of this even before the reviews were made, but they made me look for alternatives.

I like to use photoshop and play with it. You can count me to do some flyers and posters with photoshop, but don’t ask me to do logos. I really suck at that. So a way to get around this was to look for someone that would design me a logo. I searched a bit, and all offers i found were to much expensive for my budget. I was almost giving up when i found standoutblogger that got himself a new logo for his blog. I liked the new logo a lot. He got his logo on a contest in Digitalpoint forum and he managed to get this logo for $20 only!

I was thinking on doing the same thing but first i contacted the winner of the contest to see what were his fees. I checked his porfolio and liked what i have seen, and since his fees were small and quality was very impressive i ordered a logo from him.

His nick is Im3d and you can see his portfolio here.

The process of ordering was easy. He works fast an efficiently. I just told him what i wanted in the logo and he did the rest.

What i asked him was to blend B and V in a logo. It needed to be unique. shiny  and recognizable and be compatible with the blog theme. After a few modifications the result is what you can see now. I really like the logo, it is something that i can call my own and it may help brand the blog. Make it recognizable.

Note: the picture shown within post is watermarked due to security reasons

After this initial investment, i bought some ads to help spread the new logo and make it seen, the overall results will come in about a month.

So tell me your thoughts about the new logo.

Popularity: 79% [?]

This is a paid review and my opinion isn’t too much influenced by it. If you would like to get a review then visit my advertising page.

I don’t know about you, but I grew up on a small town, where many things are still traditional. I remember my grandparents had a traditional oven outside, and from time to time they gathered all the family and cooked bread on that oven. Home made bread is nothing compared to the industrial one, and my grandma bread was delicious. And she used to make delicious meals for all of us using that oven. Those were good times.

Those memories came to me again when I was asked to review Traditionaloven.com.

Traditionaloven.com is run by Rado Hand. He is an experienced and talented Oven designer and builder with years of experience. He currently resides in Brisbane, located southeast Queensland.

Rado created traditionaloven.com not only to learn how to create, upload and maintain a website, but bring him better and more profitable contracts due to web exposure. Well, he must be doing a great job getting the needed exposure because Google considers his site an authority for the Keywords “Traditional oven” and ranks first for “pizza oven” keywords. I checked gtrends and these are high competing keywords. Traditional Oven as a competition of almost 1 million pages and manages to rank first. I can only assume that he gets loads of organic and targeted traffic from Google. And we all know what that means right? $;)$

All right, we all know now what he does for a living, but what does the site have to offer?

By visiting the site you will notice that the subject of the site is mainly about traditional ovens and pizza cooking. Following the left menu you’ll see he sells CD’s that can help you understand, build similar ovens like the one’s he builds. But more important than that in my opinion, is the amount of tutorials he created for his visitors. Rado covers a wide variety of tutorials from building details to several oven tutorials like “making a wooden door for baking in wood fired ovens”, or a very useful tutorial showing how to keep a small fire in wood ovens for continuous pizza cooking.

As mentioned before, pizza cooking is one of the main subjects of the site, and if you love pizza like I do you will get very hungry looking at those detailed tutorials and articles complemented with interesting pizza pictures.

One aspect that I like in traditionaloven is the amount of images used to show Rado’s work, all taken by him. Cleaver move. J The pictures taken show the passion Rado’s has for his work, and that is noticed on a small text he wrote:

“As much as I love building with bricks and cooking in these ovens (I do also out to cater for people who I built for when they have parties and need me - another good exposure for my business)[…] People can cook efficiently by using heat energy from gentle wood fire absorbed into the firebricks the cooking refractory part is build out of. These ovens are very practical and pleasing in many aspects. One firing and the oven makes pizzas whole night, then when fire dies out you can slow roast, or reload bread baking batches for 5 hours in stable temperature, then after these you can dry fruit or wet fire-wood for

24 hours extra.”

To prove this passion, you can check the site’s blog where Rado frequently writes articles related to his business and where he gives, and I’m quoting “Practical articles, ideas and stories with tips for everyday life”.

There is also a community forum, that had to be switched off because of an 18 month contract in Europe. But Rado is now back home, and he is planning get the forums back.

The site is monetized in 3 different ways, besides the oven sales, Rado uses adsense, kontera and private ad sales. You will not see them placed all around. Only some pages have ads and in a correct number. This is a positive point. As for private advertising, he sells 125×125 ad space for $140/month. This is an interesting price considering that traditionaloven.com receives 53000 unique visitors a month with an average clickthrough of 1500, making each click cost around $0.093.

Other positive aspect is the SEO optimization of the site. All pages that I have checked have proper tags and description. Maybe we could learn something with him J

Ok now for the bad part. The overall design of the page is ok. It is not the best but is not the worst. As I usually say it is a matter of personal taste. If it is doing great for him them keep it as it is, with no major changes. I would however recommend a few minor changes.

The first one is to make the logo/header clickable. If some one wants to get back to the homepage the first thing it will do is to try and click on the logo/header of the site.

The second one is to reduce the amount of information show to the visitor. There is too much information at the same time. I’ve found myself frequently lost. My recommendation is to limit the amount of articles shown at a given page, or to divide long posts in two or more pages.

Also there are two different advertising pages. One in regular site, other in the blog. One for adwords advertising, and other for private ad selling. Don’t know if it is meant to be like this but I am of the opinion that both information should be in one place only.

If you are into this subject or want a new oven for yourself you will find traditionaloven.com a great place to visit.

Popularity: 31% [?]