Competing against huge forums

Have any of you started a forum in a niche where there already was a huge forum that you had to compete with? If so, how do you now compare with that huge forum: are you becoming the leader in the niche, or are you still working hard to overcome them? How did the huge forum react?

What gave you the motivation to start a forum even though there was a huge competitor?

 

Well I can't really speak from myself, but I assume that other people do it just because they're not focused so much on the other forum and "beating" them, rather they start the forum because they enjoy the subject and what their own community.

 

I've got at least 3 huge forums in my niche area that makes it difficult at times locating members. The main thing that sets me aside for half of them is I'm not going to offer a paid member program. I've been a member of at least one of these forums and their paid members have a “Ignore the Free Loaders” or “Why are you here without a Membership” mentality. This forum is at times very hard on new members especially if you're not a paid member. It's basically a business first and a forum last.

So instead of making money off a membership program, I'm going to offer a donation program. As an added bonus, a percentage of the donations will be donated to a non-profit organization that supports our troops. Then the rest of the money needed to support the site will come from advertising. I'll look for industry leaders who is looking for affordable advertising or companies just looking to place a single banner etc. All awhile trying to provide information on the topic and in the friendliest environment.

 

invite all the people who have been banned from the huge forum. haha




Ray, it's gotta be tough going against arfcom !

 

The biggest forum in my niche is in English and mine is not. Language-wise my forum leads the niche in which it focusses and that's enough for me. I don't really have competition language-wise, but I tend to see that English forum as a competitor so I can maintain improving my forum

 

My forum is not the leader and is still in the shadow of the massive IB owned behemoth that I was on on the payroll of before resigning and creating my own. They reacted by censoring my url if anyone uses it. I don't want to become that forum and am happy with being a steady growing thorn in their side that can react to members desires faster and offer more features.

 

Slow and stead wins the race

As it stands you have to be a paid member of AR15.com in order to be eligible for their promotional give aways. The only requirement on my forum is to be a registered member. I don't have enough members to justify giving away a complete AR15 right now but I do hand out free complete AR15 lower receivers among other prizes :cheers:

I'm about to start up my annual complete AR15 lower give away promotion if anyone is interested.

Semiautorifles Annual AR15 Receiver Promotional Give-Away! - Semiauto Rifles

 

Agreed. Are you an SBI owner? This is their motto.

 

I'm not sure, what is SBI?

 

You aren't then.

 

Some good quality posts in this thread.

I think what Noles said is true for me.

I am going against a site called Spiritual Forums one of the very largest Spiritual Communities on the net.

But for me it's not about beating them but rather about bettering my education understanding and simply because I love the niche.

It is hard to get members and traffic though I struggle with that everyday ...

 

I think a big advantage a new forum has over an established one is the fact that you can study the established one and find flaws and things to do differently. Established forums are often hard to change/improve without upsetting members somewhere. They're normally pretty stuck in their ways and the trends that have been created by the regular members over the years are almost set in stone.

So if you started a new forum off with the latest software and went through your list of 'improvements' and sort of made your forum using the legacy forum as a guide to see what's worked and what to change, you'll have a good chance of attracting members from the legacy forum.

The way I see it is this, many people on my forums are on other forums too, and providing you set it up well and improve on what's existing, you'll find a lot of members will keep visiting your forum too. There's no reason to not to, the only ones who will definitely not visit your new forum are perhaps members you don't want anyway as they'd always be mentioning 'their better forum'.

And if there are only two existing huge forums, you can rank 3rd in Google and collect a lot of their traffic accidentally - and that's normally what I look at. I ask myself 'where do I expect to rank amongst them all?'. If it's not 5th or above in big bad G then I'm not interested as that's a real stumbling block IMO.

I think if you tried to rank for "webmaster forum" now you'd have a hard job and are competing with the guys that collectively make the internet! (sort of).

Hats off to Nick and thingy (who's gone now, Chris was it?) for making this Admin forum so popular so quickly as I wouldn't like to be trying to get 3rd for "Admin Forum" amongst the 78 million results!

Food for thought there.

 

Well, having Elliquiy copied repeatedly and taking Blue Moon past DRP, I can say that if you know what you are doing, yes, with patience and skill, you can in fact completely usurp your opposition.

There are usually two reasons this sort of thing happens.

One is because you start your forum without knowing about the opposition. If this happens, you can probably go quite a ways simply through aggressive link schemes and recruitment.

The other is because you are dissatisfied with the opposition for one reason or another. This is usually a lot more difficult, because it means that they are quite significantly established, and you will be tempted to copy them and make their mistakes.

The larger, established forum has some significant advantages you are going to have to cope with.

1) They have more links to them. They have older links to them. They have better links to them. If you do not have a linkbuilding strategy, you are never going to match them.

2) They have more experience than you - usually. Me taking over Blue Moon was tantamount to entering a cheat code. I knew what Blue Moon needed, in terms of resources, to handle DRP's load when DRP crashed. I also had a significant number of e-mails to work with - many who had given up on Blue Moon but otherwise still read said e-mail. DRP on the other hand, had lousy administrative skills, and had no comprehension of how to handle their forums under load.

And thus I now control the top two websites in my niche.

3) You will be tempted to mimic them.

One spinoff of Elliquiy copied my questionnaire verbatim. More absurdly, they kept the longer rule list - which I very publicly did away with, for good reason. More rules means less members. More rules means those rules get used as a club by more sociopathic members.

Worse for them though, they wanted to be completely 'separate' from Elliquiy, and banned any and all stories originating from there. That basically forced a number of their followers straight back to Elliquiy - or, occasionally, even smaller forums.

----

So, given that, here's some advice.

1) Never start alone. Have several other members who are just as committed as you are.

2) Never start alone. Have several other members who are just as committed as you are.

3) Obey the first two rules.

I am not kidding. Alone, you are nothing. A community of one is worthless by definition.

Don't get me wrong, if you have something that people will naturally want to promote, that satisfies this requirement. Dwarf Fortress, hot actress, whatever. Do something worthwhile and people will do work for you simply by linking you from their blogroll, forum signature... whatever.

4) Use a linkbuilding strategy. If you don't do this, you aren't trying, and if you aren't trying, you are not going to succeed.

5) Get talent they don't have. Most communities are not run by technological geniuses. Whatever the reason, you want to either be more reliable than your opposition, or if that is impossible, have worthwhile content that your opposition lacks - preferably not something they are even capable of acquiring.

6) Be different. Present a different theme, style, layout, and software.

There are things each of SMF, vBulletin, and Drupal can do that the other two simply can't. Take advantage of that fact. Offer something that the competition is going to need to spend coding time to compete with.

7) Know how to code or seduce someone who does.

Simply, you need to be able to do something that your competition can't replicate. It creates a debate of architecture between your community and your opposition, and if you followed the rest of this advice, this can let you actually gain ground.