Hi all, I'm currently working on a new website. I want to include a forum in this website. But I'm afraid no-one will visit and the forum will die. How can I get enough interested people to a new forum? My only idea was to build the website and wait with the forum until there is a steady amount of visitors to the site. Then, maybe, do a survey to find out if they would be interested in a forum. Happy to hear your thoughts on this! Regards.
yes, you can start promoting the forum by visiting competitors forums and inviting people with some favors. this will help you to get some traffic and good resource t your forum. Regards
I'm in the same process. I plan on haveing friends and family make posts first. Also, you can pay to have people make many quality posts.
A forum takes a lot of dedication and work. You can expect at least 1 year before traffic starts to pick up, and 2 - 3 years before traffic really takes off. That is unless you spend money on advertising and promotion. Having a blog on the front end of the forum is a good way to target certain keywords and topics. Especially if you use a well designed platform like wordpress. It will be very possible to rank well in the search engines and provide your users with a well rounded site.
whats the forum designed in? phpbb? if so get a plugin called ico content it will populate your forum with thousands of posts and members. A great way to launch a new forum
Yes, forums are super tough to get rolling. I know contests can help but you really need to have some good moderation to keep spam out and keep up the chatter.
Forums are tough but DEFINITELY worth it if you are in it for the long run! If you have "feeder sites" as I like to call them, that will bring traffic and people with an interest in your forum topics, then you are already onto a good start. Also be sure to sign up to some sites like CommunitySpark.com which have a lot of useful ideas and knowledge. What topic are you looking at focusing on?
And what if I´d already have an established website with good traffic on the same topic. Will it work if I ask visitors to join the forum?
Forum serves as the support or discussion about your topic in the site.Customers will have a place to talk about certain topics but it is hard to establish as it needs time to be fully visited by lots of people.
yes you could hire somebody to post that has quality contents, you could also ask them to do link building for you, to advertise your site through other forum sites. the usual rate to hire a provider is $1.5-2/hr.
Make sure it's easy for visitors to see you have a forum, it may make them more inclined to click and visit the forums. If they see any interesting topics, they are just a click away from registration.
Correct, forum needs more of advertising and promotions than a blog. Blog is easier to get optimized but forums are quite competitive.