I just started a community boardinghq.com and while the site is great it needs members. If you guys dont mind, could you share some methods for getting the first 100 or so members? I dont want to hire a forum poster because i can make content myself, I mean besides that. Thanks
I would also be interested in this. All of my forums so far have had some kind of resource offered to members, so that was there motivation for registering. I am completely clueless when it comes to starting plain old discussion forums however.
IMO there isnt really any other way unless you plan on spending a ton of money for banner ads or adwords.
Well I mean I am not going to pay someone that is going to post some random stuff on my forum and then leave. I'd rather just make a few different usernames and then do it myself, though even then once the forum has some generic users and posts, how do you get REAL users to come.
My forum symbiangalaxy.org is only 2.5yrs old yet is growing very well. The secret is to offer something unique esp niche and then work on seo!
When you have paid users, the content they create shows up on SE's, then as your traffic builds up, new users that come from the SE's work their way into posting with your paid users and then eventually you don't need paid users any longer. That is the quick easy way, however it requires a decent amount of money to get it off the ground that way.
There are a lot of free ways to promote a forum. Make a series of blog posts about it. You can also start a contest, in which one way of joining is to be a forum member. Have you tried inviting experts to post on it? Does it allow off-topic posts? Even DP has a General Chat, you know. How do you entertain new members? Here is a post I hope can help you more - 10 Tips for Promoting Your Forum
so u just need member signups and dont want them to post? i can probably help you with that. shoot me a PM if interested
yeah, i agree with GuardianAngel...this are good tips to start a forum...this might really help you!!!
Well no... i dont need a bunch of non active members, but they dont have to be making 10 posts an hour either. I just need something so that when people come to the site they dont see it as empty and new.
I've been eyeing Patrick O'Keffes Managing Online Forums book for awhile now. I just looked at Amazon and it's less than $20, but that "usually ships in 4-6 weeks" is keeping me from getting it so far, I hate not having something within a week after paying for it.
I think Buying Forum registrations and Posts is a must for any newly launched forum, because visitors like to stay around, join and register only is they find activeness. Paid Forums posts could help you to start off for sure.
I have two websites with the capability to do forums. I haven't attempted to start any forums yet because I am working on other projects now, but I plan to start two forums at some point. I use getafreelancer as a resource to get temporary help at good prices. I have noticed on that site people offering employment for very reasonable rates to post a set number (normally 100 - 1000) of relevant post to some forum. I believe if I haven't found a better plan when I begin to build my forums I will offer someone on that site or a similar site to do the same. I was thinking my requirements would be to get 20 new users every week. Each user would post 10 relevant post a day and see what the bidding for such a server would cost me. I would run this for one month along with getting someone from the same site to bid on getting me 1000 links, 20 of the links would have to have a good google page rank. I don't know if my requirements are any good at this point since I am still learning the ropes, but I also thing you get the point of my suggestions.
That is exactly why you start off with paid posting. To get a base of content on the site for when interested users come.
I bought that a while ago. It's really a book for newbies who are starting forums for the first time. It tells you how to set up a forum, and stuff. And it doesn't go farther than phpBB and vBulletin as forum softwares. I'm flipping through it right now, I don't see anything about promotion.
Time and backlinks is all I can suggest. I started my forum in 2004 and have never really marketed it. I gave it out to all my friends initially and they joined, some of them got friends to join, I then got linked on a couple of good sites and time did the rest. There are almost 8000 registered members now and I gain at least 5 more every day.
You can exchange posts with other forum owners on TheAdminZone.com. Basically, you join their forum and create how many posts they request and they do the same for you. They also have monthly forum launched under the "Launch Team". If you create 50 postings on those forums, your forum will also be eligible to be displayed with their next monthly launch offs.
My forum, DiscussProxy, is brand new. The problem is, I can't just get all my friends to post on it, cause they don't know anything about owning proxies! Anybody can help me out? I'm getting payed posters and am thinking of doing a '.INFO Domain Giveaway' where I will give like 3 .info domains to first place for a posting contest. PS: For some reason, I haven't been able to access TAZ in over a year. I get a 403 error when I try to visit.