This business principle of continued contact and business relationship building has given rise to popularity of online business forums, and of course, "theme-related" online forums. Online forums quickly establish empathy, set forum owners up as "experts" in eyes of visitors, and serve as a promotional vehicle for other products and services that forum owners seek to sell.

While online forums are popular and perfect method of relationship building, starting a forum and maintaining one can be challenging, especially in beginning when members can be "few" and "far between". The challenge for most new forum owners is to get beyond initial start up phase and move onto a phase where forum members themselves promote forum simply by posting.

Although each forum is individual and personal, a few general guidelines should be followed or at least kept in mind when starting and maintaining an online forum. These are as follows:

1. Take care when choosing type of forum and forum script or software that will be used. The forum should be easy to access, easy to use, and come with "visitor- friendly" features. All visitors should be made to feel welcomed and find navigability of forum, user friendly. Forum scripts and software, especially "free" varieties, may be overburdened with ads from parent company and lead to a poor experience for visitors.

Some recommendations:

http://www.phpbb.com/ http://www.vbulletin.com/

2. The forum should have a good number of interesting and focused topics. The content should reflect interests of target audience, and every care should be made to have well-written and informative content that is updated regularly. This not only helps attract new members, it keeps older members from losing interest and defecting to other forums.

3. The forum should be Search Engine friendly. High activity forums, like popular blogs, provide a great reason for Search Engines to visit them frequently as they are brimming with fresh content all while. Dynamic urls, session ids, etc. used by most forum software can be very detrimental to forum health from Search Engine point of view.

An internet business is by far best way to support yourself if you just cannot stand working for others for less money than you need to survive. It’s also best way to get out of a good paying job that just takes up too much of your precious short life working for someone else. Let’s face it, you probably know someone who has an internet business. Do they look happy to you? Do they complain as much about work and money as you do? Probably not.

This is not to say that you should quit your job and start an internet business. You should start one while you still have your job. Some people complain that this is hard and takes up too much of their free time. In beginning a internet business is not profitable – you have to work at it like anything else.

Some people eventually go back to work blaming some program or internet business opportunity that wasted their time and didn’t work. Unfortunately, odds are actually that they didn’t work hard enough and stick to their dreams. Many people allow themselves to believe that there are no legitimate internet businesses. It’s easier to go to work thinking this than to let themselves believe that an internet business is possible, profitable, and liberating.

But if you truly believe there are no good internet businesses, that they are all scams, then what are thousands of people doing everyday in your hometown driving around during work hours?