Hello. For those who have popular forums - can you share your experience? Some tips, advices etc. About creating forum from stratch. please do not forget to mention: 1) is your forum highly tailored or general? 2) is your forum local (e.g. - city forum) or global? 3) how many visitors do you have daily? Thanks.
I have a forum that is 3 1/2 years old, has over 1 million post, over 23,000 members and over 70,000 threads. Do not try to get off cheap, as in staying with free forum software. Your forum is your business, treat is as such. Do what ever it takes to present yourself as professional. 1) is your forum highly tailored or general? - My forums are in a targeted niche. 2) is your forum local (e.g. - city forum) or global? - its targeted towards a global market. 3) how many visitors do you have daily? - About 6,000 - 8,000 unique ip addresses daily, and about 140,000 - 160,000 unique ip addresses monthly.
kev, thanks for your reply. two questions - how did you get your first 500-1000 forum posts ? how did you get your first 50-100 REAL members?
I started the forum myself, called a couple of my buddies and asked them to join. After that, my primary promotion technique is video blogging on sites like youtube. I film my own videos, edit them, and upload them. My youtube channel - http://www.youtube.com/user/survivalistboards Besides youtube, I post my videos on break.com, yahoo video, metacafe, veoh, vimeo, myspace, facebook,,,, all together its about a dozen video hosting sites I publish on. There is this site called Tubemogul that pushes your videos out to lots of other sites. You just enter your account information in at tubemogul, upload, then select which video sites you have an account on. That way I do not have to upload to a dozen sites, one at a time. After the videos, I publish a lot of pictures on my blog and forum. All of my pictures I took myself and are watermarked with my website name. Google images is one of my main sources of traffic.
Thanks Kev. Of course you did a great job with video and pictures, but the idea to create such forum in 2000 was also great, because there were not so many similar forums available in the internet.
Our forum is specific, I think its critical that you develop a community around your forum it encourages participation.
There's this one guy on the forum, Shawn, I think he's got a forum he runs, but I'm not so sure. Talk to him.
Some useful tips here. I've tried starting forums a couple of times and the ones that did work focused on a specific niche that isn't already saturated. I recently tried to start a forum focusing on films and it just wouldn't take off - I even resorted to paying for 1,000 posts to get the forum looking busy and that didn't work. The forum has now gone the way of the dodo and the only people who register are spammers.