This is segment 3 in my “Forums for Beginners” series. You can view all of them at Forums for Beginners - Forum Admin Tools

Now that you’ve gone through and decided on your niche, software and all that fun stuff we’re going to look at one of the most important steps in building your site; Keyword Research. If you have a good set of keywords that you target you will greatly improve your chances of getting members from search engines. After the jump are 2 great videos by Sage Lewis of SageRock and he explains a great way to look at keywords and what ones you should target.
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This is the second post in this series Forums for Beginners
You can view the first post here: Forums For Beginners - Time and Effort

Now that you’ve decided what Niche or topic to create your forum for its time to look into domains, hosting, and forum software.

Domain, Name, and Hosting
First, You’re going to want to look for a domain name for you forum. I recommend GoDaddy because if the site you want to buy is taken, it will give you similar domains that are still available. You’ll also need to find some hosting. There are plenty of sites out there that give you ratings on different hosts, just google about hosting and you’ll find plenty. I suggest doing you homework for both decisions on the domain as well as hosting because it can really help or hinder your experience and the traffic on your board.
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Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing this series for people who are looking to enter the world of Forum Administrating or recently have. Hopefully I can give you a few tips from another Admin who just recently went through similar challenges.

First things first when it comes to starting a forum:
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While some current Administrators and owners say that it’s “too late” to get into the world of forums, I don’t think it is any reason to stop people from starting a Forum at all.

There are plenty of forums out there that are “matured” and are behemoths creating tons of money for their owners as well as tons of new threads, posts, and registrations daily. Then there are the newer forums that don’t have quite the same strength in the search engines, pagerank or other positives that are some keys to success in the web world but have positives in their own right.
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