ONLINE FORUMS EXPLAINED

The Basics
By this time I'm assuming that you've been to an online forum. It's simply an online community based on ANY given subject matter. People visit these forums for answers to questions, share ideas, review products, etc. Since I am in the internet industry the forum that I visit daily is WebHostingTalk.com. 

Building An Online Forum
There are two main forum providers on the market. In my opinion there isn't a huge difference except for cost. The two forum providers are below:

1. vBulletin - It is often used to run larger boards and discussion communities
2. phpBB - It is a popular free and open source forum system using the PHP scripting

As I mentioned above the largest difference to me is that phpBB generally comes free with about any web hosting company out there. vBulletin has licensing fees involved and needs to be manually installed requiring some php & mySQL knowledge.

Now depending on what your intentions are for the forum may determine which would work better for you. If you plan on having a large community with thousands of users vBulletin will probably be your best bet. Now, if you're simply wanting a small forum for your informational or small business website, phpBB will work perfectly. Did I mention that phpBB is free? Once you've decided on which board works best it's time to start getting people to post & view your forum as a weekly or daily stop.

Getting Traffic To Your Forum
By now you obviously have an idea on what to have your forum on. Now it's time to start thinking about how you're going to get people to visit. I've listed 3 ideas below which hopefully will get you thinking outside the box.

1. Offer an incentive for new users or a certain post - If you have some sort of incentive like a gift certificate for the 100th new user or 1000th post it may keep people coming back.

2. Promote - If you send emails regularly make a mention of it in your signature. If you have a newsletter make sure that it gets a dedicated area in your newsletter.

3. Start a few discussions to peek interest - If people see that there are already posts in the forum it's more likely that they'll look into the posts. If it's empty they're just going to leave.

4. KEEP THE SPAMMERS OUT - I used capitalization on this because it's important. You'll find that spammers love to fill your boards with advertisement for casinos, viagra, etc. If you're going to start a forum make sure that you give it the attention that it's going to require. You'll need to log in regularly to delete all of the spam in your forum.

You'll find that the admin control panel has some great tools for keeping spammers out but they're persistent so stay on top of them.

That's About It!
As I mentioned, WebsiteSpot.com offers free forum software with any of their web hosting or Website Tonight plans so it's definitely a great place to start.

VividHosting.com offers phpBB free with all of their web hosting plans and their support is fantastic.