Looking for a home business opportunity on internet these days is a pretty involved process. That is, if you don’t know how to eliminate 90% of junk that’s out there and pick among home business opportunities that actually have merit and track records. What works?

Information sales, auctions, hard goods that can be shipped, books, reports, network marketing, you name it!

There are just certain types of home business opportunities that you want to stay away from. Those are things where someone you don’t know from Adam is making guarantees that are way too good to be true. Anyone who makes it sound like money is dripping from internet for you to simply catch in a bucket is a liar and a thief.

You will never have success with home business opportunities that promise you that you will never have to work, or make things sound too easy. Take it from a professional, working online or offline with a home business opportunity is work.

But home business opportunities have perks that are better than any job you could ever imagine.

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.