Building and hosting successful forums on your website can be a lot of hard work.  Just like you would do if you were building a house, you have to build your forums with a good foundation.  Here I have for you seven different successful forum rules you should keep in mind when you either set up a forum script, or look to redo some of your forums to make them easier for users to navigate through.

Here is my general advice for anybody out there looking to start their own forums.

1. Enable Really Simple Syndication
   You want to give people as many routes into your forums as they need.  Making sure your forum has an RSS feed gives your users one more way to keep up to date on what is happening on your forums.
2. Use an SEO Friendly Permalink Structure
   You have to have a good permalink structure to keep the search engines happy, when they are crawling over your forums.  Use page paths like "this-works-great" rather than "index=conversation2".  By using a better permalink structure, you will get ranked a little higher in search results.
3. Only Make the Forums as Complex as You Need
   Do not go overboard adding a new forum category for every wild idea you think people might want to talk about.  Only create a new category or sub-forum if there is a real need or desire for it coming from the people who use your forums.
4. Find Good People to Help You Moderate Conversations
   Once your forums have been up and running for a while, you might look towards the community you have created for people who will help you enforce the forum rules, and keep the forums active.
5. Set Some Basic Rules for Posting
   From day one, you should have a basic list of rules for people to follow.  My best advice for this situation is to keep this list somewhere where everybody can see it, and keep it simple.  If you get too complex with your rules, nobody will read them.
6. Help Feed the Discussions
   Stop in daily and see what conversations you can reply to, and try to find topics of discussion that might get more people to come by and post their thoughts, ideas, feedback or solutions.
7. Link to Your Forums from Other Places
   You need to work hard at getting new links to your forums.  You can do this from your website (if you have one) and other like-minded websites that might share the same general discussion point of your forums.

Have another rule of your own that I might have missed?  Makes sure you leave a comment and share it with the rest of us.  Learn to take care of your little community,  and make sure their needs are being met. Also, always welcome feedback, because if people care enough to complain – it means they want your forums to succeed.

One of the popular blogs out there that I really enjoy a lot is CyberNet. They always have fresh content, good reviews and reminds me of a younger and more influential Lockergnome.com. The minds behind the project – Ryan and Ashley are brilliant at what they do and have had a lot of success along the way. Then it came to me, who better to ask for advice about taking your blog to the next level than them? E-mails were sent, virtual handshakes were made and a conversation was had…

When did you know it was time to really put your all into CyberNet and try to do your best at making some money with it? Was it your goal from day one or was it something that you decided to do later on down the road?

Ryan: Our goal from day one wasn’t to make money; CyberNet was originally started as a hobby. Our goal was to do our best and put our all into it, and to write great content and tutorials that you wouldn’t find on many other sites out there. I guess you could say we were focused on quality and not quantity. We were actually surprised at the time it took to maintain a site with quality articles and we realized if we wanted to continue to provide the content, we had to find a way to make money with it. It wasn’t until about a year ago that Ashley and I both started working on CyberNet full-time.

Out of all of the money making methods out there today, which has been the most and least successful for you thus far?

Ryan: We’d have to say that Google AdSense has definitely been the most successful for us so far. Part of this is due to the fact that we have a large international audience, and Google serves ads internationally. Google has also done the best with displaying ads relevant to the content that we write. Also worth mentioning is Tribal Fusion because they’ve been really good for us as well. Since they charge on a per impression basis, we have been able to make money without needing people to click on the ads. By serving up these types of ads, our regular readers who aren’t likely to click on the ads are able to contribute to our success, just by visiting the site.

The least successful money making method for us has been Chitika. It’s something we tried in the beginning and what we found is that their ads were for products and our audience isn’t really the type to turn to an advertisement to make a purchase. We received a very little return using Chitika, and so we stopped using them.

You deliver a wide variety of content on just about anything and everything technology related. Ever find yourself getting burnt out on tech?

Ryan: We never get burnt out on tech in general. What we do get burnt out on though is simply writing. This is why we’ve made it a point to distance ourselves from the site most weekends so that come Monday morning, we are fresh and excited to get back into it.

Another way we avoid getting burnt out on technology is by writing about a variety of topics. We’ve seen gadget sites write 5-10 articles per day on a sole topic like the iPhone. Our brains would go crazy if we wrote about a single topic that many times in a single day! A variety of topics keeps things exciting.

Let’s say you find that one of your posts has really started to take off in popularity today. It’s getting mentioned all over the place and you see an increase in traffic. What is your usual course of action?

Ryan: Well, first we pull out the helium tank and blow up some balloons. Then we bust out a cake, open up a bottle of champagne and do the happy dance!

Joking aside, on a server side, we don’t really have anything to worry about when there’s an increase in traffic. We’re confident that our host can handle any surges in traffic that we may have.

From a content perspective, we try to keep up with the comments on the article and get involved in conversations that may get started so that the audience can see that being active in our community is one of our top priorities.

For anybody out there wanting to take their web site to that “next level” as far as professionalism and reach what advice would you give to them?

Ryan: We thought of a few things for this one, so we’ll just outline them in bullets.

• Success takes a lot of time and an extreme amount of patience
• You’ll get a lot of criticism along the road, people questioning your intelligence and your credibility
• More often than not, you’ll have negative people telling you what you should be doing instead of positive people telling you what you’re doing right
• Do your best to form a community and participate in it. Our community is our most valuable asset on the site right now. A lot of great readers, commenters, and members of the forum have made us what we are today
• Take time to acknowledge just how far you’ve come and the progress you’ve made
• Set goals of what you’d like to achieve and refer to them on occasion to help keep you on the right track

I want to thank Ryan for his time, and please all of you (even you there, sitting in the bathroom with your notebook PC) go visit CyberNetNews.com. Also be sure to check out our archive of other past interviews with some of the brightest minds on the Web.