While undertaking a serious attempt at building a forum from the ground up will be one of the hardest things you can do, it can also be one of the most rewarding depending on your method. If you are really passionate about your niche and have no intention initially of flipping the site for sale, then this can be a wonderful experience. For those of you looking to do the niche flip technique with forums I would fasten your seatbelt because this will be a little bit of a ride.

Forums are wonderful places where people gather en masse usually all realted or interesting in a certain subject material, niche related usually just like a blog. Whats great is that the word of mouth effect for these in social networks and bookmarks are huge. All you really need is a host , and if your a newbie a host that offers one button fantasico setup of your favorite flavor of forum. Some are better than others, but depending on how you want it skinned or if security is an issue this should be an easy choice. After you setup you will need to find a suitable theme which I can not stress enough should be completely neutral and noninvasive. This does not be it cant be really cool, but red/blue color schemes are done. Stick to colors that contrast well and make it easy for your surfer to read, after all 90% of your content with exception to the funny cat picture thread will all be text.

I honestly would never undertake this task alone as it can easily be more hours a week than a full time job. Although it can easily suck the time from your life, it will not be paying out that quick. Find some people interested in the same stuff that you feel you can trust and appoint them your moderators. Sit down with them and give them crystal clear objectives and what you want the goals of the site to be and the atmosphere you want to create.

After this go ahead and start thinking about monetization it is as good a time as any to do this. Konterra, Adsense, bidvertiser, Pretty much your run of the mill ad campaigns, Market Leverage, PepperJam, etc. Do not go overboard but rather blend them in. If you can effectively make them non invasive, or as non invasive as ads can be you will have won half the battle on this front already. Make sure its relevent material that peopel would want to click otherwise its a complete waste of space.

While most good forum domains are taken many are still available and still unregistered. Their is a wonderful assortment for pretty cheap available at sites like sitepoint and digitalpoint. Keep it short and sweet as well as to the point. If its hard to remember you will lose traffic. Steer clear of .info’s for some reason they just do not perform as well as the other 3 letter domains.

Now you have a themed shiny new forum monetized and moderated with an easy to remember domain. Whats that no one is reading it. Often more times than many people would like to admit they will pay people to professionally post to get things started. This service is often available for pennies per post. In my opinion to help get a forum off the ground that will be serious business this helps out and gets some great content flying in. After you have a couple thousand posts and have grown to over 100 members you can pretty much rely on your active members to cultivate new content for you. Encourage contests and logo designs and raffle bags to enhance that sense of community.

You will find that the growth of a forum when properly promoted and maintained will become exponential. To curb any rowdiness that may occur start making your original moderators admin’s and recruiting new moderators. While most of us enjoy the control you will not be able to baby sit this many viewers and you will want to keep the negative drama down to nothing if possible to keep everyone happy. At this point you should see some very nice returns on your investment in terms of money, community and content.

For those of you wishing to flip the blog at this point you will have maximized its exposure as much as possible. After rounding up the stats and making your for sale post you should see someone from the niche make a very nice bid. After all they are getting the forum on the level as a turn key with 0 time invested, this as you can imagine will fetch you a hefty pile of cash!