MelvinBlog

A blog that chronicles my journey on online marketing, blogging, social media, technology and life.

Problogger Forums Is Fine As Long As…

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Darren Rowse, the genius behind the popular blog Problogger has already launched the forum which is more known as the Problogger Community. Although he hasn’t yet made a formal announcement of it in his blog, the community is rapidly growing already with over 3000 members on board . Some of the prominent figures I’ve seen there are the likes of Daniel Scocco (DailyBlogTips), Jim Kukral (JimKukral.com), David Risley (DavidRisley.com) and more.

Although there is no scarcity in blogging forums, the Problogger Community is still expected to surpass all other forums and get to the top in no time. Registration is NOT free but at $1.95, heck it’s a bargain. According to most, this registration fee exists to filter out spammers. The price is set to increase soon so if you’re planning to register then the best time to do it is now.

The forum is going to be big soon and there’s no doubt about it. But on whether it can be different on other blogging forums remains to be unseen. I have been doing some detective works and observing the forums. To be honest, the forum is really good because there aren’t so many categories yet it’s not lacking anything it seems. But still I am seeing a lot of reasons why this forum can be just your another average blogging forum and here are the reasons:

  • Experts Are NOT going to lurk there – The main selling point of the forum I believe is that it’s packed with several authorities in the niche. While it can really be exciting (and astounding), it’s still the fact that these bloggers won’t devote 10% of their time in that forum. I mean these bloggers are business guys and they are busy for most part of the day so I don’t see any reason for them to lurk over there. And if I’m correct, then the main selling point is canceled out already.
  • New Forum, Same Mindset – People who go to forums usually just go there to make promotions and marketing, both direct and indirect (debatable). Aside from its a paid membership, there is really no difference between it and other blogging forums. The rules are kinda the same. You still see people drop gazillion of links (like me, or Im just joking!), see annoying members, and see a lot of blog critiques with less than 2 critiques! The forums shows leniency and in my opinion I think it needs to be more strict.
  • Lurking is Bad – Like what I’ve talked here in the blog about lurking on forums, I think it can still harm people’s productivity. Most bloggers love to lurk and waste their time lurking. Im sure they enjoy it but since they joined the Problogger Community, then I’m assuming they want to be a professional blogger. And hurting your productivity doesn’t help to become a Pro Blogger.
  • Getting Bigger – Theoretically there’s nothing wrong on having a large forums, but I always prefer smaller forums. Why? Because a smaller forum can give you a tighter community where everyone really gets to maximize every benefit they could ever gain. It builds better relationship amongst bloggers and it can really help benefit everyone. Digital Point Forums and Warrior Forum used to be a good forum and it only gets out of hand when it became highly populated. You can post a thread asking for something and in the next 20 minutes your thread is already on the third page w/no replies. Big is good, but toooo big is not!

I don’t have anything against the new community. If I have, then why would I join? Why would I care about writing this post? It’s a good forum that can be a future source of awesome content to the right person. But as far as seeing the difference of it to other blogging or webmaster-related forums, I don’t see much. I may be correct and I may not be. And someone can prove me wrong here.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. Nice post Melvin

    I also agree on the fact that little forums are more of a tight community where everyone knows each other.

    I think the new Problogger forum wil be a massive hit and wil grow very fast. I think Darren Rose is a smart person and I think he’s doing the right thing by starting a new forum.

    With already 3000 subscribers at $1,95 just calculate how much money he’s made. Absolute mastermind.

    Nice Post
    .-= Teen Blogger´s last blog ..My 1 Month Old Blog’s Journey So Far =-.

  3. Private forums are also really bad for traffic generation and this is the main point to signing up. I think I’ll stick to thewarriorforum, digitlapoint, bloggeries, blogengage etc… I’d rather the Search Engines see my links thanks. They should remove the private aspect of the forum but still accept the payment for each month of use if it’s all about money with them.

  12. I won’t be joining the problogger forum. Not because of the registration fee but because I don’t think I will benefit from it or be able to learn anything concrete without spending a ton of time finding it.

    I’m sure if there’s something in there worth noticing, then you’ll better it and make a post about it so all of us can benefit 😉
    .-= Klaus @ TechPatio´s last blog ..FeedBurner Changes Redirect Method to ‘301′ – Better SEO For Your Blog =-.

  13. I think it’s ok to join for those who really wanted to. Who will moderate the forum anyways? Is it someone with a good reputation? Is he for real? LOL There are lot of gurus here and there popping out from nowhere and it’s starting to be difficult believing these guys.
    .-= nathan´s last blog ..Be Active In Social Media =-.

  16. Having run my Virtual Coach Income Fitness forums now for several months, I can definitely say that big forums get impersonal…but the smaller forums tend to encourage more sideline cheering. And for some communities, that’s worth its weight in gold.

    When it comes right down to it – communities can rock, but it’s what the individual person DOES with their skills that makes them or breaks them.
    .-= Barbara Ling, Virtual Coach ´s last blog ..Today’s Humor of the Day – Karate Bloopers Part 1 =-.

  18. I think Darren didn’t really have the SEO thing in his mind when created the forum. I believe he just wanted to kinda have a community with people all talking about blogging

  24. Hi, member of the forums here 🙂

    I do agree that whilst a lot of the big names signed up to see what was going on – and I too noticed a fair few names that I recognised in my blogging group. I agree they won’t spend 10% of their time on there, personally I don’t think that’s important. Realistically you shouldn’t spend 10% of your time on any forum, if you want to grow your website.

    I do agree with your points made about the critiquing and same mindset. A lot of people are posting asking critiques, and whilst the responses are good, a lot of these people asking for critiques are under 10 posts. Surely you should post a little more, get a feel for the community, and get a response. It also frustrates me that people are posting quite a lot of links to their own posts (such as for “Which is the best theme?”, and people are responding with “Here’s my post about the top 10 themes”, with affiliate links stuffed in!).

    However, there’s a few good members there too 🙂

    Size wise I’m not sure I agree. Then again, I’m in a timezone where it’s very quiet normally, so I blitz it in the morning, blitz it before I got to bed, and that’s it for my fix that day (though I usually leave it open as well).

    I think the thing is that it seems more exclusive, so you’ll see a better calibre of blogger (myself oh so definitely included), hopefully? Maybe? I’m not sure. We will see though 🙂
    .-= Rhys´s last blog ..Why Wathcing England vs Ukraine on the Internet is a Huge Step Forward =-.

  27. Darren has a good rep. There’s nothing in his record that he’s into this just for the quick buck.

    Is it too late? I don’t think so. Lots of people launch their blogs every day. Forum like this has not yet outlived its usefulness.

    Forums can only do so much. It’s still up to the blog owner himself if he’d make it big or be a significant voice in the blogosphere later.
    .-= jan_geronimo´s last blog ..10 Blog Lessons I Did Not Learn From Darren Rowse =-.

  28. Darren’s forum will be great place only if you have money but at the same time I doubt whether probloggers will really come and give advice because everyone will be busy with their schedule. so really doubt about getting advice from probloggers. I guess http://probloggerforum.net will be good choice for the bloggers looking for free signup and coming together for same goal.

  32. @Melvin,
    There was announcement on his blog (with a video) a week ago.

    In my opinion, since it’s problogger who’s doing it – only because of that – it might become the ONLY blogging forum in the future. And that kind of trend is not good at all. Something like the Microsoft or Google monopoly (at a lower scale) in certain areas.

    As for me forums should be free and I shall mostly visit only free forums and free resources to find information 🙂

    It’s a massive income channel for him now. Assume that there’s always a floating (some keep backing out) membership of 10,000 users – we are talking about $20K income from subscription alone. And definitely, there will be a lot of ad income as well. Good for Darren.
    .-= Ajith´s last blog ..10 Most Annoying Ads and their irritating features =-.

  35. Apologies for not seeing this post earlier – it’s been a crazy week!

    There are a lot of comments and issues being talked about here – I hope this will cover some of the threads of conversation!

    First of all – thanks for talking about it – for one it all does help with promotion but more importantly for me it helps me improve what we’re doing to hear how people are reacting to it.

    A few reflections on your points:

    ** Experts not lurking there – on one level I’d disagree, we have quite a few pretty active experienced bloggers at the moment. They’re not all highly active but some are. Whether they stay around and participate – we’ll see, but part of me doesn’t think that it’s super important that they do because what I’m seeing happening is some great advice and fruitful conversation happening from bloggers that I’d never have heard of before this forum.

    The usual experts are great to have involved, but what I’m loving is the insights of some of the medium sized bloggers who have joined that normally don’t have a place to talk about what they’re learning. I’ve already taken away a few key tips from them to implement in my own blogging.

    ** new forum, same mindset – again, I take your point, there is some promotion going on there – that’s what we do as bloggers. However I do think that there’s also something a little different going on here too – there’s a collaboration and cooperation also happening between members that I’ve not seen before on other forums that do get overrun with self promoters.

    I think the other reason we’ll see a little less self promotion is that the forum is never going to be as big as some of the other forums around for web masters. Many of the big forums like digital point have tens and hundreds of thousands of members. As a result promoting on them can be quite effective. Our forum has 1600 or so paid members and I actually don’t see it growing beyond 3000. While that’s a good number and some might consider it to be big – if you get 1% of members to visit your link that’s only 30 people.

    When it comes to annoying people – yeah, I’m sure we’ll have those. Annoying people are everywhere, they’re on most blogs, forums, twitter, facebook and in real life 🙂

    ** Lurking is Bad – agree with this – that’s why we’re trying to run some community challenges that give people stuff to DO rather than just to read and discuss. However it’s always an issue for bloggers whether they’re forum members, addicted to social media or to reading other blogs. We all need to do more 🙂

    ** Getting Bigger – this is an interesting one. I’ve been pondering it myself and appreciate your thoughts.

    One of the reasons I put the $1.95 price on it was that I wanted to make the forum a little smaller than if it were free. I don’t want 100,000 inactive members, I’d much prefer 1000 active ones.

    Some people have suggested that we should cap membership at different numbers to keep it small. I’ve actually considered this but at 1600 members (the current number) I don’t think now’s the time and here’s why….

    One of the main reasons that I started the forum is that I want to create a place for bloggers to work together. While 1600 seems a lot (perhaps too many) for working together – the reality is that not all of those members will want to work together and that those that do come from a very diverse variety of niches.

    The most effective working together happens when bloggers from a similar niche work together. We’re actually going to add a feature to the forum in the coming week or two to make this easier – ‘groups’ – which will allow members to create spaces within the forum around their niches (or other criteria like geographic location). So all the food bloggers will have a space, all the celebrity bloggers will have a place, all the tech bloggers…. etc

    These groups will create more intimate spaces within the forum for people to interact and not be overwhelmed by the whole forum but to get enough bloggers to make this effective I suspect we need a fairly wide number of bloggers in the whole community which is why I’m not keen to cap things yet.

    In the end – all I can say is that we’re in our first week and do intend to add features and develop things further. Also it’s going to depend a little on how people use the forum as to how good it is – so people like yourself are a bit part of whether it’ll work or not.

    I’ll add a few other comments responding to individuals comments but thanks for your post. Again – it helps us improve to know what you’re thinking.
    .-= Darren Rowse´s last blog ..3 Principles of Effective Communication =-.

  36. I think small forums can be very valuable – I guess what we’re trying to build is a forum that’s not massive but that also has enough people to make it useful. As I mention in my big comments, we’re hoping to build some spaces within the community for bloggers to group together and have space within the wider community where they can have a bit more intimacy.
    .-= Darren Rowse´s last blog ..3 Principles of Effective Communication =-.

  43. and that’s exactly my point. Most big forums do have the mainstream mindset of allowing things like starting a thread about a certain topic only to find out its only a link to a blog post. There’s nothing wrong in it if its done properly. in fact I do it sometimes as well. Most bloggers will always try to be aggressive so I expect to see a lot of “throw-in” links in there.

    Right now Im playing with the forums and observing whether it could really benefit me or not. Either way I appreciate your lengthy comment. 😉

  44. First that forum is not working as of now. Second I don’t think it would succeed. No offense but it takes a lot of work to grow a forum and I don’t see any reason for people to sign to that forum just because it has very little to no traffic at all.

    peace.

  45. wise words Barbara.

    As an owner of a forum with 65,000 members on my photography site there are certainly some pros and cons of big forums. The negatives can be things becoming more impersonal – but great thing about big forums is the wealth of knowledge in the community and the power of when the group works together.
    .-= Darren Rowse´s last blog ..3 Principles of Effective Communication =-.

  46. I think I talk about this in my main comment but I think 100-200 bloggers working together sounds great but wouldn’t 100 food bloggers working together be more effective than 100 bloggers from all niches? That’s the theory I’m working on anyway – we’ll see where it leads us.
    .-= Darren Rowse´s last blog ..3 Principles of Effective Communication =-.

  47. good comments Rhys – we’re talking about what to do about the self linking to posts with affiliate links. On one hand I’m toying with not allowing it but on the other hand I think those members are going to quickly get a reputation for what they’re doing.

    What I’ve found in forums is that often the community ends up moderating and coming down on people getting too self promotional better than when the moderators do it 🙂
    .-= Darren Rowse´s last blog ..3 Principles of Effective Communication =-.

  48. that forum has been inactive for a while – they started a couple of years ago and from memory didn’t really get traction. I guess that’s what I was attempting to say about small forums – they can be good but they can also be like ghost towns with tumbleweed blowing between the threads.

    I think there’s certainly space for free forums on this topic (and there are a few around) but it’s a balancing act.
    .-= Darren Rowse´s last blog ..3 Principles of Effective Communication =-.

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