I'm going to be opening a couple of forums soon to do with domains and hosting, just wondered what sort of budget you'd need to popuate your own forum? Or what sort of tips & tricks do you recommend? Thanks, Jamie
You may not need a budget. I always use completely free methods. My latest forum is a free advertising forum. I offer a no-registration element to attract the initial content. Then, when the forum appears more busy, people will be more likely to register.
Not an easy task but it can be done if you are persistent and determined to succeed. At first hire forum posters to populate the forum with content and make it look busy. No one will join a forum if there is nothing for them to see or make them want to join. You then will need to advertise, advertise and then advertise some more. This can be buying links in signatures or Adwords or whatever gets you the best bang for your buck. You can have the best forum in the world and if no one knows about it...it will not matter. When these new visitors come to your site it will look busy and there will be information that they want and then they will join and contribute to your forum. If you use vBulletin as your forum software their are mods that are available that will help you get and keep your visitors coming back and also joining. I use a mod called vBExperience that rewards active members of the forum with points for their activities on the forum. The members can then trade in their points for Paypal cash and we will be having other items the members can "buy" with their points. It seems to be a hit with all the members. As far as the budget goes expect to payout more than you will ever get back in return unless your forum is a wild success. Owning and running a forum is more a labor of love and hobby than a money making proposition.
"Owning and running a forum is more a labor of love and hobby than a money making proposition." Agreed, Well Said
well it depends on the content your forum has, the best recommended ways would be conducting regular contests, have games if possible, try to make your forum innovative from others and yeah try to use a good theme, themes usually attract few people (just like me )
it takes time, it really really does. theere is no magic way. sure you can pay people to post, but is that content you really want? I have a photography forum. I created a myspace profile and, over time, gained 10,000 friends. i would then send out bulletins telling people about my forums. I also had my link in my signature on other boards I posted on. I gain a few members that way. all in all, content is KING. "build it and they will come" worked in 2002, but not anymore. my forum has about 10-15 active members and its been almost a year. its really difficult. almost think of your forum as a lifetime project. stay consistent, learn little tricks here and there, and you will have an active community.
One way to build up content is with an RSS posting bot. Certain forums, such as VBulletin have this feature built in. You could grab several RSS feeds from places like yahoo news and CNet (just to name a few), set the bot to check the RSS feed from that page every X number of hours and then to post X number of articles. This provides your site with free, easy and targeted content. I am running the VBulletin posting bot on 3 different forums - my forum, my wifes and my sons forum. You just set the bot to what ever you want and let it go. In a few weeks you could have hundreds of threads. To stop from getting a duplicate content penalty, post a good reply to some of the articles that the bots posted.
@kev true. I have some feeds on my site, its nice. another thing you can do is start threads that get people posting like "1000th post in this thread gets a prize" or word game, etc.