Fellow members and forum owners, I'd like for you to share tips on how to market a forum on any niche... Regards
Post great articles on your forum and submit the links to social networking websites such as twitter and facebook. Post controversial topics to get people to react and post.
Basically, you market it the same way you would any other site or product. Social Networking/Bookmarking, Forum posting, SEO etc
You can also try some ads to promote your forum if you dpn't mind such invest.I't so tough a course for you to make your forum popular and well-known.Therefore,you should prepare well for hardwork.
Well said. I believe that forums are harder to market and popularity comes more slowly compared to a regular website or blog.
It doesn't always have to be unethical. Do you have a genuine interest in your forum's topic? Then network away. Go on other forums, make yourself known and network with scores of people from all over the world who are also interested in your forum's niche -- they'll come. You need to offer something (just like any other site) that your competitors can't/don't.
make sure you have a lot of members or create fake ones so people who visit your forum wont get turned away cusz they feel that forum is empty
I think it'd be much easier to market a forum on an already well established website with good content and regular visitors than to just have an empty forum and hope for members who will post regularly.
Content, Content, and More Content... It's sad but true, unless you have people there and appearance of an active forum, no one will register. This means you can bring on a couple of people who are familiar with your niche to help talk about a variety of topics in the niche. If you can find people who would do it for free that would even be better, but most likely they'll want a piece of the pie, and rightfully so.
Forums need adding good content, good moderation, good marketing for an extensible amount of time. Provided you do it right, you should start seeing good changes after two years or so.
The primary promotion technique for my forum is posting videos on youtube. Over the past 2 1/2 years I have posted around 280 - 290 videos on youtube alone. That is not counting yahoo video, break, metacafe, dailymotion, veoh, vimeo,,,. According to my google analytics, traffic from google has about a 50% bounce rate. Traffic from youtube has around a 23% bounce rate.
What other techniques have you tried (especially for the survival forum in your sig) ? Tell me about the difficulties you encountered when you first started the forum..
Try hosting a contest for new and current members or try posting insightful comments on related blogs in your niche to get good back links to your forum
The most important thing is to look at the view of the forum as a community. Build the community, avoid excessive moderation, reward good posters, and allow dofollow signatures.
I tried everything that you normally read about in webmaster forums - such as link building, posting articles, submitting to directories, joining other forums and having my link in my signature,,,,,. That survival forum was started in april of 2006 with some really cheap hosting and some free forum software. From april 2006 - march 2007 I tried just about everything that you read about and that I listed above. I guess it was around december 2006 when a buddy of mine showed me some videos made by rant radio and sean kennedy. After watching several of the videos, I was very impressed. After thinking about it for a couple of months, and getting a game plan together, I decided it was time for a major change. In March of 2007 I closed the site, switched to VBulletin, upgraded the hosting account, opened a youtube account and started all over gain. All of the post and threads for the past year were lost. The first 2 months were about the same as the past year. Traffic was terrible, hardly any post, just a few loyal members. Then around June, July,,,, 2007 the traffic started to pick up. Some of the members were haters from youtube - "your videos are terrible, you stink, please stop making videos,,," those people were banned from the forum and blocked on youtube. Fast forward 2 1/2 years - I have 290 videos on youtube, around 11,000 subscribers, I'am a youtube partner and I just bought a wide screen digital camera. And now, instead of just posting videos on youtube, I blast them out to about 10 different video hosting sites. Including yahoo video, metacafe, dailymotion, break, vimeo, veoh, myspace, facebook,,,, only to name a few.