What do you see as the best ways to Promote a new forum? I can only think of doing good SEO. I tried joining other communities in my Niche, I haven't been excessively advertising my one, just put it in my Sig and contributed like normal but I've been getting warned for advertising in the same niche as them and been seen as a rival.
You cant adevertise on your competitor sites whatever your site is you will get banned. What you need is content and for a forum you need a heap of it. So you can either try make it all yourself or get friend to help or pay for it. Forum are now very difficult to promote because there is so many of them.
Yeah I know, I took a real gentle approach to it and didn't advertise as such, just had a small logo and link in my Signature. There are way too many forums out there with way too many members in all niches it's near impossible to get forums popular now. I know it's not an overnight process to build a big community but I was hoping it wouldn't take aslong as this but I think I will have to build up my main site and overtime SEO it will eventually get there. Still open for suggestions. Niche is spread over spearfishing/free diving/fishing etc
True but you can make their forums implode . I keep 1000 mail addresses just for wonderful things like this , it takes a bit of effort and some teamwork but they will usually lose most of their members after 1 month of continuous attacks (it's not something you should do) Anyway OP : Try giving away some cheap spearfishing/diving gear in some quality post contest , offer bonuses for people that get other people (5$ for a friend that makes 100 posts is something to remember ). And use the AdWords to advertise on their website . If they have picture ads then that is the best effect since it will trigger discussions . Recruiting from high school and uni forums is also a good choice .
Thanks for that mate, some good ideas there. Not too keen on imploding competitors forums, just incase it earns my site a bad rep and no one wil join us, or the other forum will do the same to me. Was thinking about some sort of incentive, but as we are a non-profit organization based out of a small town, it would be hard to do such things. We thought that after we got the main site up and got some credibility from some companies, we could strike a deal with them to provide free gear for contests, in return to linking to their site or something. But that could be a while before the site is good enough and we want to kick the forum off soon as other forums are growing rapidly.
EMAIL, I always get the best reactions from this, get a list of optin people in the relevant industry and do it, trust me it works. Make sure the email is tasteful and has a link to the front page asking them to signup.
Marketing is really in important aspect. I see many people just following "contest is king", however, that content would not be king unless there are people to view it. So despite of the great quality of content, your forum would not succeed. What you should do is, cutting a lil budget from your content creation, spend some more on advertising. Another fact is, if your forum is advertised on some of the respected and famous blogs/sites/forums, your users tend to think that your forum is more reliable.
We are trying to focus on Marketing for the Forum but since we are a non-profit organization we can't afford to splash out on such services. So for now it will be a heavy focus on Content with Marketing on the side.
Are you intoxicated man ? You seems to be making a confusion between content and contest . As for the budget for content it's a forum , users create the content . I highly doubt that they have any budget for content creation .