You may have heard that having a web community is a great way to increase sales, customer loyalty and word of mouth for your web business. In fact a web community itself, if large enough and targeting an affluent demographic (or one that advertisers like to target), has the potential to bring in revenue. Commonly people use a web forum as the centre point for a web community. However building a popular forum is no easy task and requires patience and dedication.
To help you better understand what it takes to build a successful forum I will outline some of the lessons I have learnt over the years.
Perhaps the least important variable, but certainly a vital aspect, is the forum software you choose. I came to settle on mybb as my favorite forum of choice. Over the years I became very familiar with mybb Board functions so it would take a lot for me to switch to different forum software.

The other top quality free forums out there are listed below. I see these forums everywhere so I think you can take that as a strong endorsement.
phpBB
MYBB
SMF
As I said which forum software you choose is not too important. You are going to have to learn to use at least one, so choose the one that satisfies your criteria and then get playing. If the idea of installing forum software is daunting to you then I suggest you contact me @ (p.oluseyi@yahoo.com or 08064373324) for assistance on setting up your installation .
Regardless of which forum software you choose the hardest part of building a community is getting members, and members that stick around. Obviously your forum should be targeted to your business niche or target market if it’s not a business site. My Jobberguys.info Forum was all about education, jobs, entertainments and science.
Picking the niche area you target is vital for success, and the individual forums you create for your community must clearly represent the purpose of your community. However this is where some lessons can be learnt. At first when you start building categories and individual forums you might get carried away with all the interesting forums you can create.
You dream of your users lapping it up and talking away about every little area of interest you can come up with. This is the first major mistake you can make. You end up creating way too many forums that have no topics in them. Even if you do manage to bring some quality visitors to your site, they hit your forum and see an empty place and then move on. No one feels compelled to join an empty forum.
But you may ask then, how can you go from having an empty forum to one filled with topics when no one wants to get things started? It’s a catch 22 isn’t it! The number one concept to remember is that people bring in people. If visitors see topics and posts and discussions they are interested in they are more likely to contribute. It’s hardest early on when you first launch but there are some tricks you can do. Here are the key pointers I’ve learnt to get passed this early stage of a ghost-town forum.

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