[FlyBoy73]

Originally Posted by Scrolls

FlyBoy-You say leaders of each topic niche is pretty much covered, and this is very true, ALTHOUGH, competition can be swift in the coming. Think search engines who was number one before Google seemingly came out of nowhere? Everyone has a chance to become the number one of thier chosen topic, it just takes alot of time, effort, luck, and a damned good marketing ploy! lol

Oh, you are right about the "competition" or new arrivals in the same niche, but to overcome an established community that has a lot of momentum already built up is a very hard thing to do even if the new forum actually does things better.

A few years back I started up a community covering jetski racing since I was pretty heavily involved in that. My graphics / skins were tops.. I had the best software (vBulletin) with lots of features, galleries and much more, whereas the community that had been around for about a year and a half longer when I started was running a basic phpbb and had no graphics and very few features. As hard as I worked it was a huge uphill battle to get people to do more than register and check it out. We had a number of solid members but most just were not going to move. To be honest though, it was not my primary community and after about a year I got disillusioned with it. If I had kept up 110% it very well could be the premier community now since the guy I was competing against pretty much let it go. I could have also thrown more money at it, etc... etc.. So, yes, it can be done, but it is hard as heck.

With regards to search engines, they constantly flux, but the community with the most threads/posts usually have the most links/references in all the major search engines. My Big Board's links pretty much come up near the top for any thing you can think of in my niche. The only way for that to happen is to have a ton of unique content and time. If there was a new forum on the block it would cost them a fortune in adwords (etc) to get noticed. That, fortunately, is not going to happen in my niche since it isn't a big money market.

Again, it all comes down to lots of hard work. Nothing is impossible.