Managing a great forum community

A slick user interface will always draw people to join a website. But in the forum world, you need content to continue the conversation.

Here are 3 ways we continued to develop good content.

1. Member articles. We've always encouraged members to submit articles that on topic to our site. But we've also gone a step further and invited the really good authors to start columns.
2. Podcast. We recently added a different media by going audio. Just like with written articles, we ask members to submit on topic audio. It's a great way to get people excited about the community and it draws new people to check us out via itunes and the other podcast venues.
3. Controversy. We don't ever have to start a controversy. All we have to do is monitor them and keep them within the rules. The cool thing about a little controversy on a forum site is that it often does more than just get people involved in the discussion... it often spills over into articles and even the podcast.

I launched Youth Ministry Exchange on December 2nd, 2005 with little more than a few ideas, some dreams, some friends, and some basic commitments to myself.

1. The site wasn't going to lose any money... ever.
2. It wasn't going to take over my life... ever.
3. It wasn't going to get stale or ingrown... ever.

Nearly one year later, all of those commitments remain true.

While I don't claim to be an expert, I think that my commitments are similar to other webmasters looking to manage forum communities. It's my simple hope that this lens will help those people. Keep it profitable, keep it easy to manage, keep it fresh.

Starting an online business wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be. But it also didn't come without some mistakes. For whatever reason (I believe it's the hand of God) YMX survived my early mistakes and we benefited greatly.

- Getting a partner. I swallowed my pride. I knew I could do the technical stuff, but I needed someone to help me drive the forums. Derek has been fantastic at that. This worked for us.

-Staying out of debt. We (Derek and I) determined we weren't going to risk much money in trying to make YMX work. Since we started the site with almost no start-up costs... we made money in the first 24 hours. This worked for us.

- Staying friends. There was a lot of stress between me, my business partner, and my moderator team. Making friendship a priority saved the site. This worked for us.

- Affiliates. I know a lot of people make money with affiliates... the only one that ever worked for us has been Amazon. This didn't work for us.

- Word of blog advertising. People blogging, even negatively, about our site made it grow. This worked for us.

- Moderating that spurs discussion and rarely thwarts it. Actually, a driving thing behind the development of the site was that other sites over-moderated. So, we determined early on that maintaining basic rules would be best, but being overly defensive would be a mistake. This worked for us.

- Neutrality. Within our niche` there are 3 major publishers. Rather than aligning with any of them directly, we've fought hard to stay "indie." This is working for us.

- Gadgets. Our site is based on two Open Source packages called Joomla and Simple Machines. Playing with too many gadgets was fun for me, but confusing for our users. This didn't work for us.

- The temptation for us was to copy what was working with other sites. Unfortunately for us, people are sophisticated and we looked dumb. This didn't work for us.

One of the first major decisions we had to make was about money. If we weren't going to lose any money on the site, how could we make money?

The next question for us was "Do we make people pay to use our site or do we just ask for donations?"

The short term answer is "ask for for donations." We knew that there were people willing to pay hundreds of dollars to see the creation of our community. But we felt like if we started off asking for money because it was easy now, it would be harder later.

So we set up simple membership tiers. Premium membership was $5 per year and basic was free. In the end, asking everyone to share a little bit was far better than asking a few to share a lot.