Please share with me what i can do to promote my forum? Any ideas? Experience or just wild guesses..... How to make forum appealing to the audience? Thank you
Well posting on other forums is a good way to start, but the more you can help people on other forums, the more people will check out your signature links. It's a tough sell because your forum is on a market which not only has a lot of competition, but has very strong competition (this forum is a fine example). My advice: Specialize. DP covers a wide range of topics and there are people on here that cover each one well, but there are only a couple topics where the content is really powerful. Do you specialize on one of the topics that is in your forum? If so, then remove the other topics, and begin specializing in the topics that you do well. Do that, and you could potentially become an expert resource in that area where people would prefer to go to your site and post to find an answer. There are tons of forums that compete with each other and for any given question I have specific forums that I prefer to post a question on or research something on because I feel the content is better there. There is room for everyone, but if you choose to have a forum that encompasses everything, it is very tough to start out, because you will then have to know all of the answers. Oh, almost forgot. Other methods that you could use to promote your forum: Advertisements on other forums (even if they are direct competitors, the good ones realize that there is room for everyone, DP is a perfect example). PPC SEO so that people searching for certain topics will stumble upon your site and ask a question. Finding experts in certain areas that don't currently utilize a forum. This is a tough one to do, but you could create a seperate section for them to specialize and advertise in for themselves. Directory links, etc. One last word of advice: You can generate all the traffic that you want to your site, but if you cannot provide value in at least one topic that is better than others, then people will not have a reason to visit and contribute to your site. Good luck! -Ray
lots of people love to argue, so if you have several very opinionated posters people can get into arguments, and a lot of information usually comes out in arguments to support peoples points, so it's kind of a win-win
What does your forum offer that others dont? You need to offer something other forums dont, that would make people come back again and again.
what we have done on our forum http://www.webmastersroom.com is people are paid for the posts, this has proven very popular introduced a free web directory for users also revenue sharing on the site via adsense the site has really grown very quick since november, with regulars coming back and over 9500 posts since it opened maybe some of these ideas will help u suceed