A forum should be thought of as a business, not a website. If you plan on starting a high quality community, plan on spending real cash. Don’t use every free service you can and throw money at long shots. Do your homework.
How much money do I need?
Do some searches for “starting a small business” or something of the sort. You will find that most business fail due to “lack of startup capital”. This is the same reason that you will fail if you don’t pay attention.
Search the net for “business plan samples”. Read some sample plans, get an idea of what they are, then write one. Waste of time?…I think not. A very important part of a business plan is budgeting. How much money are you planning to spend to get the forum up and running? How much will you spend the first year?…how about the second and third years.
Plan to have enough money in the bank to sustain your community for 3 years. For example, if it will cost you $500 for software to start the site and $300/year in hosting and advertising, then you should have $1400 dollars in the bank. WHAT! That’s right…create a plan…fund the plan…stick to the plan as much as possible.
Having money in the bank ensures you a chance. Everyone reads blogs about making money and how it can be done in a few months. This only true if you know exactly what your doing already. Most people that have started a website and succeeded very quickly have already failed on other projects. Just ask them.
Failing is learning.
Failing is learning…so plan to fail. Give yourself room to fail on a small scale. In building a great community, many ideas will not work. In fact, 9 out of 10 of my ideas don’t work. I plan for this. Everytime I have failed, it has brought me closer to success.
If you plan for minor mistakes and bumps along the way, you can ensure that the entire community (business) doesn’t fail. Having a little extra money in the bank will help you with that day you accidentally spend $250 on AdWords with no results. Every great web entrepeneur knows that mistake.
I still haven’t covered programs, hack, mods, plugins….I know. We’re starting with the important stuff. Tune in tomorrow.
JBSlife
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