Properly planning and organizing events are the roots for creating a memorable and successful one. The most detailed and well-thought out events are the ones that have the best chance at succeeding. Most administrators don’t take the time to properly plan and organize their events, will you? Hopefully this ForumBlogger article will aid you in your quest to creating an amazing and exciting event on your forum.

Create a Rough Idea of What You Want This Event to Be

You want to be able to start somewhere before speaking to your staff members on your forum. The first thing you should do is jot down a few key things about the event and anything that you think would be important to discuss when speaking with your staff. Make sure you have a rough idea of the amount of work that will be needed from the staff members and what you plan to put on the table.

Announce It to Your Staff

Once you have a rough idea of what you want this event to be, it is time to announce your plans to the staff. You could post this announcement in the staff room, or by any other means of staff communication. This can be a simple “get ready” announcement, with some of the details you drew up. Make sure they have a decent idea of what you are planning, you don’t need to go into detail at this point, that will come later on, but make sure that you give enough information so that there isn’t much confusion about what exactly is going to happen.

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If you can’t think of anything to search, you can always just browse their icon sets.

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Since I created the article “How to Motivate Yourself,” I thought it would be nice to create “How to Motivate Your Staff.” They compliment each other, and hopefully with the knowledge of these two articles, you can successfully motivate yourself AND others, which is an important skill to have as an administrator on a forum.

First, You Must Be Motivated

It’s really hard to motivate others if you are not motivated. You can’t really express your ideas in an enthusiastic way if you are not motivated about the subject at hand. So before you try to motivate others, make sure you are motivated.

Don’t Talk As Much About the Work Involved

Just as you can’t “think about the work” when motivating yourself, try to avoid talking about the work involved as much as you can when speaking with your staff team. People are typically NOT motivated about work, so talking about it won’t help you motivate them. So what do you do?

Talk About The Finished Product

If you are motivated about the finished product then you should hopefully be able to transmit that enthusiasm towards your staff members. One of the best way to transmit this sort of enthusiasm is by having chats with your staff. These chats could be individual or groups. I have found that motivating your staff through chat is much more efficient than through forum-means.

What you want to do when you speak with your staff is

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Private message advertising is a thing most administrators deem as bad, but to what extent? Would giving the administrator of a forum a link to your own forum be considered PM advertisement? Is it harmful or “bad” to do something like this? Is PM advertising all around bad, or is there a good side to it? I think PM advertising is an interesting topic to talk about, because I think different people have a different idea of what it really means to be advertising through private messages on forums. I think people advertise all the time, but maybe not with the intention of “PM advertising.” So what do you think?

Questions to Answer in the Comments:

1) What do you classify PM advertising as?

2) What do you personally do in circumstances where PM advertisement has occurred on your forum?

3) Have you ever advertised your forum or website through private messages? How?

Feel free to leave your response.

I talk a lot about motivation on my blog, so I thought I would share a personal way I am able motivate myself. Motivation is one beast that is impossible to master. Most people can’t just go from being completely unmotivated to motivated in an instant, but there are techniques you can use that will help you if you ever feel unmotivated to work.

Don’t Think About The Work. Think About The Final Product.

We will always try to avoid things that seem to be displeasing. If “working” seems displeasing, then our minds will make us not want to do it. It is as simple as that. So how would you trick your mind into liking work if it already seems displeasing?

Don’t envision the work needed to complete the project, just imagine the final product. Imagine when it is completely finished, and imagine how great it will be. Imagine the floods of members and posts that will be rushing in after you complete your project. Now isn’t that an awesome idea?

The Best Way to Motivate Yourself to Work is by NOT Thinking About the Work

It won’t help you whatsoever to keep thinking about the daunting amount of work that is needed before your project is even complete. It won’t speed things up if you convince yourself that there is still a lot of work ahead.

So think about what you want it to be. Think about how great it will turn out to be, and forget about all the work in between, that is nothing.

That is how I manage to motivate myself. I don’t think about the work needed to reach the final product, I just envision the final product already completed. That motivates me. That drives me. If you want that final product badly enough, you will find the motivation needed to work on it.

Final Note:

I hope you find this technique helpful in your pursuit to motivate yourself to work, which I realize is EXTREMELY hard to do at times. I face it all the time, and everyone else does to, but what separates a great administrator from a poor one is the ability to conquer this barrier. You just have to find tricks like these that can help you overcome these obstacles so that you can have your forum be the success it deserves to be.

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I’m sure many of you are thinking right now, “Have you gone mad? How can closing your forum help it at all?” Why no, I have not gone mad, but I come to you with a very interesting idea that I have seen work on many forums. Closing down your forum may not be as bad as you think… but only if you do the right things.

A Risky But Proven Method

I have to tell you right now, I have never done anything like this, but I have seen others do it with amazing results. Results that beat almost every revamp of a forum I’ve seen because of how it is implemented.

What these administrators did was not necessarily on purpose, but the end result was similarly the same: an extremely active forum with a revitalized “new forum energy” that exceeded a “traditional” revamp.

So what did they do? Well, they closed down their forum and opened it weeks later with huge updates and a lot of hype.

How Is This Different From a Revamp and How Is It Better?

Good question. After analyzing why others had such great success with this method, I started to realize a few things:

This is better because it creates more hype than a normal revamp

A normal revamp traditionally consists of an administrator that probably closes down a forum for a few hours to a day and applies a multitude of modifications to their existing forum. This can create hype, but it’s not as much as weeks of it. When you close down your forum and you don’t mention about opening again, you can expect that many of the members will receive a re-opening very well. This is why I mentioned that most of the administrators that did this, did not necessarily do it on purpose. They probably had no intentions of opening the forum again, but when they did, the results were quite phenomenal.

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A lot of forums are made every week. Most of those forums will close within 3 months. Why is it that the majority of forums just die out like that? The reason:

A disillusioned administrator creates a forum, but the minute he realizes it requires a lot of time and work to maintain it, he is no longer motivated, which causes the forum to die a slow and painful death.

Slow and painful indeed. It’s sad to see potential forums close down due to lack of motivation on the administrator’s part. It angers me when an administrator comes to me seeking forum advice, but when he realizes that the forum requires so much attention and work, he decides to quit.

Why This Happens

I’ve been following forum development for a while and I’ve come up with an elegant answer to this seemingly complex question. Why do 99% of forums die?

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We are just barely one week into 2011 and I’ve decided to make a list of things that you should be doing for 2011 if you have not already done so.

Change your forum’s TITLE to reflect your forum’s interest and gain Google SEO:

If your forum’s TITLE is just “My Forum” then change it to “My Forum – Description of Forum.” It will easily and quickly grab the attention of your guests and you can increase your forum’s traffic by doing so.

Have a 2010 Awards Ceremony:

Starting an awards ceremony can really bring your forum’s community back together after a long holiday break. You can look back at 2010 and see who were the most active members, most active staff members, funniest posts, etc. Be creative with your awards and try to get everyone to participate. Remember that you have to really work to promote this event properly.

If Your Forum Is Struggling, Find Those Followers:

You can’t start a forum without followers. It’s really the one thing you need before launching a community, and if you are struggling to find followers, I have written an article that will get you started here.

Become More Active Than You Ever Were Before:

You should be the main source of activity on your forum. If you did not realize that, then you better make it your goal this year. Your activity as the administrator of that forum is crucial for its overall activity. When the main administrator begins to post less, you will see how the whole forum begins to post less as well. Your forum’s activity does truly depend on your own activity, so make this year your most active year yet!

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Acronym Game is This Week’s “Forum Game of the Week”

What the Game Is:

The acronym game is a great and easy game to host on your forum. The object of the game is to make the funniest sentence or phrase from the acronym letters that you provide.

How to Set It Up:

Setting this game up is extremely easy, just state the few rules I will be posting below and come up with a random order of letters. Don’t try to create an acronym for something, just put a few letters together and see what creative minds your members have. You will probably be laughing very hard with some of the posts you get in this game.

After your members have finished submitting their answers, pick the funniest one, create a new round with a new acronym, rinse, and repeat.

Just remind your members that it is supposed to be funny and not serious!

Quick Example of What It Should Be:

Acronym: H.C.T.T.E.S

My Post: Hot chimpanzees typically taste evil salami

Rules to Play Game:

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This is a highly disregarded step, but the most important step when creating a event or contest. What is it?

Promoting the Event or Contest Is The Most Important Step

I’ve seen forum administrators that think of everything, but miss this crucial step for some reason. Giving a highly valued prize will get people that know about it interested, but if you want a successful contest or event, you will need to do much more than that. Note that I will be referring to both of these as events now, instead of repeating “event or contest” every time.

The 3 Steps to a Successful Event

1) Planning and Organizing the Event

Without properly planning and organizing the event, you will obviously not have a successful one. You need to think of rules, how you will manage the event, prizes, etc. This is a lot of work and just because it’s the first step, it does not mean that it is the least important. Take your time planning out your event and never rush it. You only have one chance to pull this event off well!

2) The Prize (aka “The Incentive”)

The prize is the incentive for participating in the event. Without a good enough prize

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