Hello. I set up a forum about 2 days ago. I already have 8 members and over 30 posts up. But from the current rate of visitors (i.e. none really), I really can't see it ever working out. You see, I don't know where to advertise it. I don't want to pay for ads as I don't generate any income from the forum. To be honest I have no idea how to market it. But at the same time I really want it to work. Any ideas guys? My forum is called PromoteBB - http://www.promotebb.com/ (p.s. I hope I'm not breaking any forum rules by posting the link).
Give people an incentive for signing up together. Put a large prize up (win $10,000 for signing up..etc)
The OP mentioned that the forum doesn't make any money.. so unless someone is out of their mind.. $10k seems quite silly. For free promotion, you could try making a few press releases to free PR sites.. use forum signature links and other similar stuff. Also a quick glance on your forum doesn't really convey the message of what it is about. You might want to work on that and look for other similar forums in the niche that you can promote.
Provide some free down loadable resources. Make it as a forum thread and make it private. That way if your visitors want to download it then they will have to register on your forum first to view the files for downloading. I did that in the past for one of my other sites and it worked.
I've seen some forums that use an add-on that lets you see a few threads, maybe 5, then you have to signup to see the rest that would help with sign-ups I imagine. As for getting people there in the first place, there needs to be engaging threads in the forums, useful information that will drive search engine traffic there.
Yeah these plugins usually force me to sign up, you just need to have a decent amount of content on your forum already for new-users to post on, while making sure that your old-users are still posting/replying to the new-users.
Why did you decide to make a forum anyway? Do you have blogs or other websites that can benefit from it? Starting from scratch is really tough considering there are thousands of other forums out there.
Work at making it to have discussions that people will find to be useful and would make them to contribute. Again write articles that are related to your forum threads. Let the resource box have your forums link so that when you submit the article to directories people will click it and thus they will be directed to your forum.
Here are some things that you can do: 1. Promote it on other forums, create an awareness about your forum. 2. Perform SEO for your niche, so that you can start getting some rankings and get some natural traffic. 3. Go on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube 4. Give incentives to join. Incentives need not necessarily be in monitory terms, it could be some free virtual goodies, or some ficticious rankings or ratings. People on forums always tend to get attracted by this. Hope it helps.
invite your friends Email extract and send email invitation other forum signatures Blog Roll Buy Adspace Adwords
starting a forum from scratch (without an existing website with a regular userbase) is a rather tedious and involved process. roughly, to be successful in the long term (and get at least to alexa top 100k which is where you start to see any half-decent income from the forum and for it to stay "alive" by itself), you need to have at least 40-50 regular posters, at least one fulltime moderator/contributor, and traffic of 3-4k+ visitors/day. getting there from zero is rather hard. the only reliable way to do it is by outsourcing content and PR to at least 4-5 fulltime employees who will post linkbaiting and interesting stuff and engage in discussions with each other, plus social-bookmark linkbait threads, promote them on related blogs and sites, etc. there are numerous products out there on starting forums - you can go read it up.