Getting the most mileage out of this or any forum...
Majority of the newbies into forum marketing make this mistake of being too assertive in their approach, often using explicit texts to coax readers into looking into their signature. I would like to stress on the fact that such an approach will hardly deliver any lasting results in the long run. You may make a sale here and there, but you'll miss the gold mine lying underneath.
If you truly want to get the maximum results from forums, spend some quality time here and share real information. Be real. Don't force yourself into making n posts every time you make a visit here. It doesn't matter how many posts you make but how many people that have benefited from reading your posts. The feedback you get will be far more heartening to read than seeing the posts counter below your member name. And these are the very people you'll most likely be doing business with.
Always remember this: People who visit you signature links after being impressed by the information you have posted, are far more likely to do long-term business with you than casual visitors, who visit you, being impressed by the text in your signature.
Haste never delivers. Anything that's built with love, care and patience will always deliver the most. Be it an ice-cream or a house. The longer the time you'll spend on them, the better they'll turn out to be. So don't rush and take it easy.
phpbb vs minibb
Forums are a great source of information and to harness it fully, it is important that they are search engine friendly. Phpbb, due to it's popularity, appeared to be the right candidate for my forum, but it had one major drawback. It was not search engine friendly. I used Craven de Kere's search engine optimization mod and the combination proved to be a success, atleast initially.
However, there were some short comings in the mod that I noticed after few months. A lot of duplicate pages were being indexed by Google and I was risking getting my site banned. Also, my site was not ranking in Yahoo! There were other features of phpbb that I didn't like:
* Very heavy stuff - slow to load and waste of bandwidth.
* Lots of features that I won't be using ever.
* Pages were bulky with lot's of javascripts, styles, etc. As a result difficult to rank higher on search engines.
* Got hacked twice and lost forum data over 3 months.
Minibb came as godsend to me. I stumbled upon it after searching almost a whole day on Google for a search engine friendly forum. Here's what I liked (and liking) about minibb:
* Very search engine friendly by default (no need to add any mods).
* Pages are small and fast loading.
* Best suited for small to medium sites.
* Excellent support. The developers are very active in developing the forum. Suggestions are acted upon immediately (if they are in best interests).
Although it's not that popular now compared to phpbb, it's developers have been working since 2001 and it's unlikely that they'll leave the project in between.
Note: There is no guarantee that minibb won't be hacked. Only time will tell how the developers are going to tackle it, once the software becomes popular.
