Forum Added To Ministry-to-Children.com

After about 3 hours of work, I have the forums up and running at my children’s ministry blog. They are built on bbPress which I installed automatically with Simple Scripts via my Bluehost dashboard.

Overall, it was easier than I imagined. The only hang up was customizing the forum appearance to better match the main website.

A few considerations:

• The success of forums depend on a large group of active readers. This is the main reason I held off until now to add them. But with several thousand unique visitors each day, the website seemed like it was ready to expand.
• Forums can be a great way for readers to contribute to the website. By asking and answering questions, the community created content expands the value of the site rapidly. Plus, bbPress can be set up to be very search engine friendly.
• To get the forums past the tipping point, I’m running a contest to encourage readers to register. Bottom line – if I can ‘t get readers to use the forum then they will not add value. So, giving away $60 in books from Amazon seemed like a good strategy. If it pays off, then the forums will get off to a strong start and have some momentum going forward.