As you know, I've started up a forum, however I'm still learning about all the gismos, designs, and gadgets that make one up. Should I start the Public Relation (PR) process, use default skins, activate the SEO software and submit my website to search engines now to get members aware of the site, or should I wait until I get everything nice and clean first?

My thoughts are, if I open the forum to the public, it's sort of like letting people work in a building that's still being constructed (like Donald Trump's Building Towers). It seems to work for him, but does it work for online communities?

Well before you go live I would make sure all aspects of the board are working correctly.

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To be honest as long as you put a noticy or somewhere on your site that it's still under construction you should be fine. I did this with my site, I opened it up to the public and put an announcement stating that the site is still under constant change and it actually worked out okay. I agree with whitemike, though at least have your basic links working.

By the way if you don't mind me asking, what did you have in mind for advertising your site? Reason I ask is beause I need to advertise my site too but have no clue as to how to go about it.

beware to have at least the forums right, because once open robots start to read them and if you start to mix them all up after a few weeks, all the links are dead and some search engines will be unhappy.

be sure to have vbseo correctly set up also since it is that soft that will make your url's . adding forums isn't bad but deleting or renaming is a mistake

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Good advice. I'm not going to open the forum until I have unique features on the site, and everything is in working order. In terms of advertising, I was just going to post on related forums to link my site, thereafter people can come in from google searches, or hopefully be linked back to my main key feature which will draw people to post. That's what I hope. I haven't gotten that far yet, but I'm sure once I get to that point I'll be posting about the same question on this site.

As Mike said I would make sure everything is working correctly. You can always add/delete forums as you go along. As long as the site is open you can start building back links and post a thread here and there. I think most new members will understand you're still working on the place and not expect anything great right off the bat.

The best time to open a forum for business is right now, it's getting colder outside and people are spending more time at their computers, meaning they're more likely to sign up and participate. Over the summer my traffic drops by about 1/3 just because people are spending time out doors away from their computers.

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- Big Dan proprietor of DJ Talk

I never factored in user activity with the weather. I have lots to work on before the forum opens. Hopefully I can finish it up in time for forums "sweeps months" for lack of a better phrase.

I'd never thought of it before until I looked at my long term stats. It makes sense even TV in the summer stinks, it's all reruns. In colder climates at least here in the north east and I'm sure other parts of the world, in spring & summer everyone is looking to spend as much time out of the house and in the fresh air as possible.

The summer is the best time to do your SEO and link building because search engines are constantly updating. ;) Spend some time outside yourself and just work on the forum here and there over the summer, by the time late fall comes you will be all set to open, hopefully have some decent search engine rankings and gain members from the link building you've done here and there over the summer.

I have two forums that I started fooling around with in July. Both have only a small handful of members now but by January I hope to have a decent member base.

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- Big Dan proprietor of DJ Talk

Good tips again. Thanks!

Should one develop a membership base first before implementing annoying google ads on the site? I don't want to detered would be members from the site because of the google ads. Personally I think twice when I do see such ads. What do you guys think?

I'd say Adsense right away. Definitely a block on the homepage and in showthread.

The primary reason for putting adsense up right away is in order to serve ads, Google's adsense bot has to crawl your site to see what it's about. Google's adsense bot caches your content and Googlebot (the main index spider) crawls the cache, because the content is already cached Google crawls it faster, thus you get into Google's index faster.

I've tested this theory on more than one occasion. I've bought a brand new domain, installed wordpress and put an adsense block up on it with in a day or two I was in Google's index.

Likewise, when I removed Adsense off my main forum the speed at which new content appeared in Google slowed down by a good week or so.

So, I'd definetly put adsense up. Most forum surfers are web savvy and are either ad blind or smart enough to know that running a website costs money and don't mind the ads as long as they aren't blastered all over the place.

As a matter of fact I just wrote about forums with too many ads on my blog. It's a pretty long post but worth a look if you're interested in my opinion. :p Call me stingy with my knowledge.. » Big Dan dot us

Hope it helps,
Dan

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- Big Dan proprietor of DJ Talk