ProBoards is one of the leading suppliers of forum hosting software and their platform is free for small or personal users with a paid option for business use.

A typical example of a ProBoards hosted forum

Proboards helps you to build a brand by nurturing and growing a community around it.

Building a community round your product, service or brand is a great strategy for engaging with those who like or use your product/service or might be researching products for use in the future. One of the best established ways to do this is to host a forum where existing users can chat, ask and answer questions and generally spread the word about your business.

If a potential new user finds your forum, connected to a product he is interested, in then allowing “guest” access could be a great way of answering their questions and addressing the doubts they may have about becoming one of your customers, (patients, subscribers, members etc, depending on what it is that you do).

This is not a new idea, there are plenty of well-established forums out there. There is a trend now to do a similar thing using closed or private groups on Facebook and other social media platforms but there’s no reason why these can’t live happily side-by-side and double the imapact.

If you want to get a forum up and running quickly, looking professional and without any of the technical challenges that you might enacounter if you tried to go it alone, then ProBoards is probably the one for you. Setting up your own forum to try it all out is completely free – your only investment being the time it takes.

You should bear in mind however that, although ProBoards handle all the technical stuff, it’s your forum! You need to monitor it, respond the questions and matters raised and generally moderate the way that it is used. The more popular your forum becomes, the more of an overhead it is likely to be but the strength of the couunity you build around your product/service is well worth the effort.

ProBoards is, by a long way, the most popular and widest used host of free forums on the web. Their platform is easy to use, solid and secure. I have no hesitation in recommending that you take a look and give it a try with the free version. The pro version, should you choose to upgrade, will give you the ability to drop the ProBoards logo and fully white-label your forum with your brand etc. Well worth the $49/month it costs for businesses to do this and you get a host of other business related features as well.