Stuart Wright, Founder of AVForums.com Interviewed

So You Think you have a Busy Forum?

How about a forum with over 200000 members and 5 Million Posts and exceeding 1 Million Unique Visitors a month?

Stuart Wright, founder of AVForums.com explains how he does it! See the interview here: Interview with Stuart Wright, Founder of AVForums.com

I am going to highlite two replies this time - spot on advice - Thank you Stuart.

What advice would you give someone who wants to build a successful forum?

* Focus on a topic which doesn’t already have a significant forum. For example, when I started AVForums, the largest other audio visual forum was (and still is) the AV Science forum. However, AVSForum.com is aimed at the US market. AVForums was initially (and largely still is) aimed squarely at the UK visitor. Our traffic is going to be limited because of that choice, but it means we dominate our market. There was and there still is no other significant audio visual electronics forum in the UK.

* Choose a topic which interests you and about which you have some knowledge. In the early days, you may find that you are one of the main contributors.

* Try and partner with a website which has the traffic you want but which doesn’t already have a community.

* Also pick a topic which you can envisage generating advertising revenue. I am lucky because although I didn’t consider it at the time, audio visual home consumer electronics can command a fairly high revenue. Hence we have lots of advertisers from a wide variety of product types with a fair advertising budget. This contrasts with, say, a DVD forum where there is a narrow range of related products and very little margin on DVDs. Given a choice, start a forum about real cars rather than toy ones.

What advice would you give to a Young Entrepreneur setting up their first business?

If you don’t enjoy what you are doing so much that you could easily do it 16 hours a day, 7 days a week for several years, forget it.