What are the best ways of getting a forum on SERP? A forum has all the pages with long querystrings. Isn't that very opposite to google's guidelines.
atleast you need 5 members of the forum such that each can be there for some hours and keep making posts, referring new members. Very few like to fill up a new forum, most members love to reply threads , rather then creating new ones. Initial stage is a big hard , but if you put in 100% efforts no one can stop you frm success. this should be the 1st step for initiatign your boards
If you're hugely ambitious on making a successful forum, you could hire posters to start new threads and make your forums active for a while to stop new users felling "intimidated".
Yeh, its difficult. My forum went live at the start of April and so far the only real contributor's have been three users, Me, Myself & I Ive got around 90 members most of those came through a couple of competitions I ran when I initially started up. Stopped running the competitions to concentrate on some SEO technique and the posts dried up. I wonder how many new forums owners there are on this board and whether it would be possible to start up some sort of cross promotion thread, where we can post in each others forums to make them look busy..? Just a thought.
I`m trying for a long time to make people come to my forum and i have only got 150 members until now. it`s very very hard. You have to offer prizes, gifts, incentivize, referral programs, paid posting etc.
the key for a starting forum is to have 5 really active members (10 posts daily each) to get the board going, without those 5, ur not gonna survivie
If you can hire a poster that really knows about what he's talking to, then you're forum will be popular. Members will come back to your site. Words of mouth is the best way of advertising.
get back links, put the link in your sig on all forums like this that you visit.. make quality post, and sometimes ppl will check out site out that way.. make a forum that your are deeply interested in, and add content every day. besides the tips that have been posted so far, this is my 2 cents good luck with your forum
Are you ppls talking about a forum atached to an website or just a forum (like http://www.disboards.com) ?
You need to make sure the urls don't have session id's and that the search engines can spider the entire forum.
paid services are good if they have time gap contract like 1 post a day and u have 500 such paid posters for a year , it works. but 3 posters for a month next 11 months you are dry like a desert.
Well at the moment Im trying the following to promote my forum which is UK based DVD site: 1 Google Adwords. 2 Posting on other DVD related forums with a link in my sig. 3 Running a competition and promoting it on other sites such as www.prizefinder.co.uk The first two are mechanisms to get people to visit the site. Ive designed the competition around a points/cash mod that ive installed in the board. The idea being that you can enter the competition as many times as you like so long as you have enough points to buy a ticket. Seems to be working, Im getting a few lurkers coming out of the woodwork, although not as many as I would like. Still its early days yet.
1) Press release 2) Digg 3) Create myspace page 4) Submit to similar forums (not competitors) That's what i can think of atm
ask your friend to post reply/create a topic in your website. As reward..you'll give him/her admin status..that works for me..heheh,..dont bother with spam..its normal for a new forums.
Someone else here had the good idea of reciprocal forum posts. Is there a site someplace like a forum exchange, where you can find forums in topics that interest you, and exchange post counts with other users? That would be great. Maybe I'll make one. ... well maybe when I have more time to breathe. But if you're interested, it might be a good idea. I've got a business-oriented forum, and I'd be more than happy to exchange posts with anyone in most types of forums. Just PM me if you want to give it a go. Jenn
Forum needs to have a certain number of posts. There are some other things that need to be done, but that's one of them. Paid posting is one way to do it, and posting by yourself is another way to do it. Yet another way to do this is to exchange posts.
have one huge contest. But make sure you get someone well known on to support it else people won't believe that you would actually pay once it ends, well known need not be bill gates, couple of old dp members would do. You can get idea from earnersforum contest. apart from this other methods of promotions are all mentioned above.