[Glubz]

Thanks for tips Omniscient, great threads as usual!

[Eternal.]

Damn, 50 tries to become this successful? How is support forums doing? Do you ever plan on selling it?

[Cole ‎‎‎]

Was there anytime when hackforums sky rocketed? Or has it just slowly gone up in numbers.

[Omniscient]

Does being a webmaster become a compulsive addiction after a certain period of time? For example, after you make 5-10 websites/forums, you'd like to try more and more niches and subjects for each and you just can't find enough space on one or two websites, so you make more and more and more websites? It seems like it'd become an easy addiction.

For me it's about being a workaholic combined with my love for forums.

[Ulysses S Grant™]

Yeah I am creating one soon for me its just the will to stop my other projects to start a new one I just wish I had a team to do it with ,.

How do you do stuff yourself without others motivating and telling you goodjob ect ?

[xhflhkeuhwguu34]

I want to start doing something like this but one of the tricky parts of it is finding adequate staff members for the site. Any tips?

[Yummy]

Because I get asked fairly often how I got HF so big or I'm asked for advice on how to start a forum. I wrote up the most point blank steps I could think of.

1. Find a topic you can discuss everyday that you're passionate about and knowledgeable.
2. Make sure the niche has potential to grow. Review any existing sites in the space only to observe their size.
3. Begin creating the most unique site you can.
4. Officially launch site and promote it where you're allowed and is appropriate. DO NOT ADVERTISE ON COMPETING SITES...that almost never works an usually pisses people off. Look for places where a potential member might be.
5. Work on SEO. This means find and then targeting your keywords, optimizing your html code and images, and making sure you have quality in-bound links.
6. Be patient and steadfast. It can take a lot of time to feel successful and in the end your project will very likely fail anyways. If so then go back to step 1 and try again.

HF for example was probably my 50th forum..maybe more actually. I had at one point over 200 websites. No exaggeration. I had my hands in everything. The chance of success was increased because I had so many projects. Most projects fail. That's just how it is. So my approach was simple. Work work work and put my fingers into as many pies as possible.

I gained a ton of experience over the years in just about every aspect of being a webmaster and often the master part of that word is ignored and not properly appreciated. I am a webMASTER. There is almost nothing I can't do myself or deal with. So my personal approach was to just keep working, gaining knowledge, and growing. At the moment HF is my most successful project but that's the result of me being a successful webmaster.

The road to success is not a quick 5 step process. It's a cross country highway that you're jogging. If you work hard and stick with it eventually you'll find you've made it.

Also be aware that while HF is my current and most successful site it's not my first internet success. I'm not a one-trick pony and if I didn't have HF tomorrow it wouldn't take me long to have a couple dozen new projects. HF takes up all my time and I've become very frugal when it comes to extra projects now.

Were you interested in hacking before coming up with the idea of HackForums? Or have you grown to like hacking due to the success of HackForums? I feel that it's important to be interested in the niche. Because if you aren't interested then it will be harder to make it a success.

[Ben121]

Are any of your other project still active(whether or not you manage them currently)?

If so mind if I ask what they are?

[Omniscient]

I want to start doing something like this but one of the tricky parts of it is finding adequate staff members for the site. Any tips?

If you need staff to start a forum from zero then you don't know enough on your own to start a forum period.

Damn, 50 tries to become this successful? How is support forums doing? Do you ever plan on selling it?

Many of my other projects were successful and sold. But I was looking for a success that I would not need to sell to continually monetize. SF is just sitting there. I have no plans for it or any of my other sidelined projects.

Are any of your other project still active(whether or not you manage them currently)?

I still have a couple dozen websites online and about 250+ domains still. None of them do I actively advertise or participate at. They are all just sitting there. I maintain them and keep them online and that's about it.

[Crake]

HF is really a brilliant example of SEO (1st or second in searches for almost anything) do you have any tips on this Omni?

[Isidar]

I personally believe that if you want to make a new forum and want it to be a success, you need to spend more than you would have had to a few years back because of the competition. I think having a premium domain certainly helps, especially for a brand new forum with competition, you need some sort of starting advantage and I feel a premium domain does just that.

I personally find it quite stupid how people usually start forums without any content and then advertise it, if you wanted to sign up to a forum, you'd want some activity.

SEO is king these days, you can't really be too successful unless you rank well for keywords.

Seems like most people start forums because they are passionate for the first few days, but when they only get a few sign ups, they've lost all that possession and drop the project instead of sticking with it. If you want to run a forum, it has to be because you want to and not do it for the money.

[Omniscient]

For SEO first focus should be your own site. Making sure that the way the search engines read your site makes sense and that you comply with all standards. It's a semi-complicated task for a beginner and in my experiences so-called SEO experts don't focus on this enough. They normally just spam your site link around the globe in bad neighborhoods.

Secondly you should work on your keyword targeting. Do all the research you can about what keywords you want to have on your site and what keywords you want linked to your site.

Third you'll want to work heavily on quality content and making sure you feed Google something fresh daily. Google loves to eat up fresh quality pages made of HQ content. So feed the CrawlerBot with all you can.

Lastly you can create some in-bound links. They should not just be to your front page. You'll want links to internal pages with proper keywords.

Don't be ashamed to be a stats whore either. Check your Google Analytics daily and use it to figure out where people are coming from and under what keywords. Make adjustments to your site based on that. If you're getting great traffic to a thread for a keyword then consider making it a sticky. If you see that certain keywords are getting you good traffic then consider adding it as a category and adding the keyword to your forum description or title.

SEO is easy enough but also complicated when it comes down to the nitty gritty. It's all about the fine tuning you can do to tweak your site ever so slightly.

[Crake]

For SEO first focus should be your own site. Making sure that the way the search engines read your site makes sense and that you comply with all standards. It's a semi-complicated task for a beginner and in my experiences so-called SEO experts don't focus on this enough. They normally just spam your site link around the globe in bad neighborhoods.

Secondly you should work on your keyword targeting. Do all the research you can about what keywords you want to have on your site and what keywords you want linked to your site.

Third you'll want to work heavily on quality content and making sure you feed Google something fresh daily. Google loves to eat up fresh quality pages made of HQ content. So feed the CrawlerBot with all you can.

Lastly you can create some in-bound links. They should not just be to your front page. You'll want links to internal pages with proper keywords.

Don't be ashamed to be a stats whore either. Check your Google Analytics daily and use it to figure out where people are coming from and under what keywords. Make adjustments to your site based on that. If you're getting great traffic to a thread for a keyword then consider making it a sticky. If you see that certain keywords are getting you good traffic then consider adding it as a category and adding the keyword to your forum description or title.

SEO is easy enough but also complicated when it comes down to the nitty gritty. It's all about the fine tuning you can do to tweak your site ever so slightly.

Wow, that was a fast response, thanks! How do you select keywords for such a broad site like HackForums? I mean, with everything from graphics to RATing how do you know what to target? Is it best just to focus on the most-visited sections or simply to rely on the most-used keywords?

[Kosmos]

For SEO first focus should be your own site. Making sure that the way the search engines read your site makes sense and that you comply with all standards. It's a semi-complicated task for a beginner and in my experiences so-called SEO experts don't focus on this enough. They normally just spam your site link around the globe in bad neighborhoods.

Secondly you should work on your keyword targeting. Do all the research you can about what keywords you want to have on your site and what keywords you want linked to your site.

Third you'll want to work heavily on quality content and making sure you feed Google something fresh daily. Google loves to eat up fresh quality pages made of HQ content. So feed the CrawlerBot with all you can.

Lastly you can create some in-bound links. They should not just be to your front page. You'll want links to internal pages with proper keywords.

Don't be ashamed to be a stats whore either. Check your Google Analytics daily and use it to figure out where people are coming from and under what keywords. Make adjustments to your site based on that. If you're getting great traffic to a thread for a keyword then consider making it a sticky. If you see that certain keywords are getting you good traffic then consider adding it as a category and adding the keyword to your forum description or title.

SEO is easy enough but also complicated when it comes down to the nitty gritty. It's all about the fine tuning you can do to tweak your site ever so slightly.

Wow! That's some advice. 👍 Thank you, this thread surely has given me some motivation to start working with websites/forums. Sure, it isn't a day by day transformation and it takes time, but I think after awhile I'll manage.

Practice makes perfect, right?

[Autopost]

Pretty nice of you to share your experience, what sites are still actually running?