First post here so please bear with me. If I'm posting in the wrong place, please let me know.

What do you believe are some of the characteristics of a niche that make it 'fertile ground' for a successful forum? I've been thinking about it and here are a few of the ones I've come up with.

* Long term appeal - It has to be something people are interested in over a long period of time like a hobby, occupation, chronic illness, etc. Quickly-solved problems won't be sticky enough.

* Computer Friendly Audience - There are lots of people STILL not using computers, or who don't spend much time on them. The topic must interest people who use them and spend time on them.

* Passionate Interest - People must be passionate enough about it or have a great deal of interest so they want to discuss it regularly.

* Depth & Breadth - There has to be enough depth & breadth to the topic to allow ongoing discussion.

What are some more? Get my juices flowing!

P.S. This place looks great! I look forward to learning a lot here.

a good amount, but not too much, competition

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PA Forums
Philly Sports
Delaware Online
boomshockalacka

Thanks for the response!

Any opinions on how much that is? How to quantify it?

hard to do that, just think overalls.

general chat >saturated, too much competition<
chat about humpback whales >not much if any competition<

you see, too much competition makes it super hard to break through and be a authoritative site. not enough or no competition might tell you that there just aren't people online that are interested in it......OR......you actually found a unexploited niche, which is very rare...

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PA Forums
Philly Sports
Delaware Online
boomshockalacka

Yeah, I understand what you're saying. It's true of niche marketing in general, not just forums.

A lack of competition can also be good at times. I started my Archie Comics board because I couldn't find any Archie Comics forums, and I now have 238 members and well over 10,000 posts in just under 26 months.

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The Oldiesmann
SMF Project Manager
SMF+Gallery2 Integration Project - Beta3.1 now available!

The best thing to do is take something very popular that people already love, do it the same but add a spin or slant to it.

For example, Chatrooms were done to death a few years ago, now you get 3D chat rooms starting to emerge.

With Forums, you need to offer something that bit different to suck people in and want to tell others where they hang out and a general chat forum is no different to 20,000,000 other sites, but if yours offers greater interaction than just posting, for example, off the top of my head... posting for rewards..... 100 posts earns you 10cents, suddenly its something new, exciting and capitalises on peoples greed to earn money doing F' All. Obviously it wouldnt probably pay to actually pay people to post on a forum and you would suffer people posting crap all the time to get the cash but having said that, with a lot of work and some clever ingenuity someone will come up with the Paid To Post forum where members can earn REAL CASH for what they post! And that is a new slant on a very competitive area.

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