Debut of the Rich Sage FREE Ad Forums

One of the elements that I wish to ‘cultivate’ at Rich Sage dot com is more and more reader interaction. I want to create several places where readers build the content –often described as “user generated content” by the gurus.

I’ve come up with these ideas to do that:

• A forum area where registered members can create free ads –This is what I just implemented at http://forums.richsage.com.
• A gallery area where readers can post images –More accurately, I want to post images of people who wear Rich Sage t-shirts. Then I can allow the pink Rich Sage Diva (ladies) and blue Rich Sage Prodigy (guys) pictures and have people vote on them.
• User comments –that’s already running. I will update user comments in the next site update to post comments more freely. At this time I have to approve each comment.

The first of the ideas is now up and running. Sure there are a few things that I need to make better like the logo/image for the forum and some of the forum titles. But that will get done in the next few days. It’s a work in progress…

How to Maximize Your Traffic with a Forum…

A Few Ideas Setting Up My Forums:

Here are some of the considerations that I made when I setup the forum:

• I considered free software, but in this user generated content area, I ruled it out because I wanted to go with what I thought was the best. The best forum software in my opinion is vBulletin.
• vBulletin software helps me automate many of the tasks that I have to manage to run the forum. It’s not 100% automated, but I can easily manage things until it gets busy.
• Once the forum gets busy it’s very easy to assign moderators, who can help manage the content.
• The last element was the hardest –How can I setup something that benefits the community and aides readers? There are enough discussion areas. I ended up going with something that would help the online business community by aiding advertising, SEO and traffic.  This was rather important because I have no content at this time, nor do I have a legion of people who can quickly register.  I had to have another reason for people to use the forum.

Getting Started:

I’ve seen websites and user groups of people offering to post content on forums to get things started.  I don’t believe in “feeding” what may be false content to get a forum going.  If no one posts, I’ll just post my own content until things pickup.

I am sure in no time the user numbers will pick up.  Certainly, my traffic has picked up greatly, and this will just add more and more to the daily content and the various search engine spiders will pick up things very quickly.

In the coming weeks I’ll publish a full review of the vBulletin product to share with my readers what I feel are the most important features of a forum/discussion software program.  I will also let you know what elements of my new forum were a “hit” and what went “bust” and had to be changed.

Carpe Diem,

Rich Sage