My forum has been on for about 3 months and have been getting around 1K unique visitors per day, however, I have only 100 members. Many of them just read the contents and leave the site without registering or participating. What can I do to get members to my forums.
A good idea is to add premium stuff to your forum - it can be anything, tutorials, articles, promotions. In order to read that stuff, a user must have to register on the forum. You can spread the word around through facebook, twitter & youtube.
I had success contacting a few users who were very knowledgeable and paying them say 20 cents per post. Once you have a large number of posts you will start getting organic search traffic from Google and can stop the payments.
Don't pay for posts, unless you want to spend loads of money. It takes tons of posts to build a active community. Join many admin forums, and do post exchanges. I recommend starting at forumpromotion.net.
I actually agree with paying of posts. These days you can get $0.20/thread and $0.10/post and while it is expensive you can set aside a budget of ~$200/month (with 1k unique visits/day you can probably get this from ads) and work like that.
I don't see how is it possible. 1K uniques is an insane result, and unless you do keyword spamming (like people visit your forum and see it is complete BS and does not offer enough value to read/participate and bounce back), the only reason to explain only 100 members I can offer is that your registration form is broken or verification email is bouncing back or something along these lines
You can create fake accounts and use them to start new topics and reply to existing one, this way, your visitor don't feel them alone in your forum.
Whatever the forum is about, you should know the main type of info that people are coming there for. By that I mean the guests who log on for information are looking for answers to questions. Sometimes that answer is not easy to figure out which is why your guests will surf your forum. The goal is to get them to want to post and ask questions or continue the discussion. Figure out what questions your guests would like to ask based on whatever questions led them to your forum in the first place. Then you make it so if a guest wants to make a post they have to register. And yes you may have to pay for a few posts in order to get this going, but you'll tell your paid forum posters exactly where they need to lead the discussion.
Paying for posts is like making holes in your own pocket....you may earn posts but you loose money at the same time
Personally I believe in Traffic BEFORE Interaction. 95% of the time successful forums are started on web sites that are already receiving traffic. 95% of the time forums fail because the website is JUST the forum and there's no traffic.
Try to use a good call to action somewhere, such as "Sign up to become a member"...make it clear and easy to understand....good luck
I'm not an expert though. How about you disallow viewing the threads? That way you will increase your members.
You can use PostLoop to get some constant activity to your forum. Another great way is to write some great stuff on other forums and put your adress to the forum in description of signature.
One great way to do this is to use Facebook.Either Facebook fanpage or paid advertising.You can't rule out advertising,trust me.