Forum for blog?

Hey all!
I want to build a forum for one of my blogs, and I've found a lot of free places to build it, BUT I wanna know if any of you guys have a lot of experience in this field?
I want to be able to use elements from my blogdesign on the forum template and I would like to ad some Adsense on it, but is this possible on those free forum makers like Phhpb and what not...
Any help is much appreciated

 

Ya, it's possible to put adsense on free forum makers like Phpbb

 

I have some experience in the field, currently growing my own forum at the moment.

However i would advise that you make sure that you have enough traffic and unique visitors to make the forum lively, if not the forum could bring a negative look to your blog site.

 

Hmm I haven't thought of that...Thank you!

 

Thank you

 

I don't quite agree. I believe there's a difference between a "forum" forum and a personal blog forum. The trick is to make a personal forum look more active than it is. Which means, limit the number of boards you have.

~silverwing

 

you may also want to be carefully monitor statistics particuarly CTR to make sure you don't get dropped to a lower pay bracket per click (smart priced). in general forums don't do well because you get tons of repeat visitors that become blind to advertisements.

 

I've found that BBPress is highly customizable when using it with WordPress. I am building very highly integrated WPMU and BBPress site. It simply looks great.

 

it's alright.Making a forum is easy,its the creating a nice design part,which is a headache

 

I use 2 wordpress sites to help drive traffic to my forum.

When an article is posted on the wordpress sites, at the end of the article I will put something like "Want more information like this article, then visit the forum." And "then visit the forum" will be hyper linked to the forum index, or a certain section of the forum. Sometimes I will post the same article in the forum and on the wordpress sites (just changed up a little), disable comments on the wordpress article and provide a pointer to the article in the forum with a hyper link saying "click here to discuss this article."

Since the wordpress sites are using domain names close to my forum name, they grab a lot of SERPs for different key words. The forum uses certain keywords, one wordpress site uses different key words and the third site uses yet more keywords. One of the wordpress sites is even ranked in a #1 post on google for certain words, while the forum is around #3 for the same words.

All three sites have similar headers, similar colors but are different enough that people can tell the difference. The two wordpress sites also cover different topics. Using a portal such as a blog is a great way to help drive traffic to a forum. But I went ahead and bought domain names and set up full websites as portals, instead of using a blogger page.

Something you did not state - did you want the forum and the blog bridged? Do you want the members to have an account on both sites? If you use a free forum hosting account, this might be hard to do. Most bridges work best when both sites are on the same server. If you want to really do something like this, get yourself a shared server and go with something like wordpress then a forum that will integrate with it. Wordpress has a forum that is native to it, but its not a very popular forum solution.

 

Depending on the blog and forum software, you can integrate the two.

 

i would suggest phpbb..its because there are thousands of members using it so you get may support from phpb community..

 

Even though you can't integrate it, I suggest FluxBB or PunBB. Both are very, very basic clean forum software. Your site is a blog, so you might as well keep it that way.

 

FluxBB seems to just be a fork of PunBB right now. (From the style to the "Unfortunately no one can be told what FluxBB is - you have to see it for yourself." tagline.)

If you don't need integration, you really can't go wrong with any of the software packages mentioned. Try them out and use the one that you feel most comfortable with.

~silverwing - there's also MyBB