I'm not sure this is the right place for this but anyway, I've put a forum on my website because people were asking questions in the guestbook. Please can I have some suggestions on how to attract some genuine users and how to persuade them to register. I've read all sorts of things about people registering themselves in several different names on their own new forums and then writing posts to make the forum look busy. Any help would be much appreciated.
What I did with my forum (a freelance writing forum that's doing alright) was to simply announce it to other writers I knew. That gave it a nice kickstart. I didn't use paid posters, and only set up one false account (which I think I used to post maybe twice or so but mostly just used to test things like the warning system on). Something that helped was that I kept the marketplace area private for members (where I post writers' markets, which is why a lot of people register). I just recently put a post count limit on being able to access it, and some of our silent members have gone from lurkers to active members since then, so that helped too. Just offer something they want to see, but make it only available to members. Then promote whatever that happens to be, rather than promoting the forum in general.
Do you have a lot of repeat visitors? If so, you may not have to do all that much work to get the forum going!
I do have repeat visitors and I haven't advertised the forum. I'm targeting dog lovers and people who are starting out with dog agility. I'll try and think of something that they would want to see and make it available to members only.
While you may want it 'available' to registered members only, you should really only restrict posting to members only. That way Google and other SEs can crawl the forum, and that will be extra content for your site, which will result in more visitors
The key ingredient is traffic initially. With lots of active members it's near impossible to get a community going. That's why it's not always the best idea launching a site which is solely a forum.
The way I did it on my forum was to actually show the topics but when they click on the topic, they will be required to register. After registering, I have premium portions where people are required to post at least 10 posts for them to open those portions. The first thing I did was to spill out a lot of time and effort to post my own postings, collect articles and ideas. I was posting like 10 a day and invited about 3 people to help me post. Another dirty trick that I tried (but worked, although not recommended but worth a try): I asked more than 5 people (my friends) to actually post items that contradicts each other, creating a "fight" scene, people usually loves to read about conflicting ideas and ranting and sometimes cursing. People will even want to jump in and take sides and will create more people to want to post their ideas to simply fortify which side this person took on. And so the growth of your content boost up. Post it on other forums under a fake username and tell them with a line like "These people didnt know what they were talking about?" with a link going back to your forum, negative postings always attract people's attention, and when they come to your forum, they see it is all good and the negative notion disappears. These are just some approaches (maybe dirty to some people, but definitely worked for me) My forum stat: Total number of registered users: 23602 Total number of topics: 29658 Total number of posts: 346185
I recommend you use your guestbook to your advantage. If someone asks a question there, put the q&a in your forum, then go to your guestbook and tell them the answer to the question is in the forum with a link back to it. There are also paid posters you can find right here on DP.
That kind of did work on my forum when we had a discussion about "god" and gay people - though I had to remove the thread after a short while because it was getting a tad out of hand but still within a few hours it saw quite a few people sign up just to post in it.