Overall, I think this is the number one question. How to get real people to join your forum (without paying for posts)??? I think the easiest way is to get people interested in that subject and give them a benefit to join that forum. For DP, the buy/sell/trade section is obviously most useful and also all of the other sections have interesting threads. What do you guys think???
I have a 2 word answer for your question - Targeted Adverting. To promote your forum effectively, you need to know "who" your target audience is, "where" your target audience is at and "how" to reach that audience. This breaks down to - Who, Where and How. I use 2 different methods to reach my target audience - videos and a portal. Videos - youtube, break, yahoo video, metacafe, dailymotion,,,,,,, Make the videos of good quality, and informative - and people will pay attention. Portals - I bought a couple of domain names that are close to my forum. On these sites I post the videos (embedded from the video hosting sites), images and articles. The articles on the portals use targeted keywords and rank well in google results pages. The key to having a successful forum is to reach your target audience. And reach them in such a way that they will want to be part of your community.
This is so true. Solid and truthful advice!! I have 3 forum that are very active. It isn't easy but in the end it pays!!
Start a referral competition..and offer some $$ to the persons who invited maximum number of users to your forum Regrads
I ran a contest to try and get members so excited they started referring friends, but I didn't hit my target goal. Unfortunately, I have some big fish in the pond I am swimming in, and I am just a little minow. I'm not giving up. One thing that I am doing now is writing a blueprint/ebook on the topic and linking back to the forums for some of the info. Hopefully that will help a little bit as well.