Best ways to get starting traffic to forum

Imagine you now open new forum, what are the first steps to get starting traffic?

 

- Do some directory submissions.
- Post on forums with the link to your forums in your signature.
- Write some articles even if it is two articles related to the theme of your forum and post them on internet in the article directories.
- Go and help the needful people on your own forums as there might be some people by now needing some help from your side.

 

thanks for replying. I did not do directory submits. Is that like regular site submits, you must have a recip? I dont want to have directory links on my forum

 

I wrote ICo-Content exactly for that purpose. I had to start a new forum myself and was wondering how to get the ball rolling. An empty forum is hardly inviting and paid posting put me off big time. So I wrote this to get good forum-style content which acts as a pull factor. Real people see decent activity and content and chime in on their own initiative. For me and dozens of people who bought it for their forums, it has worked great.

Nice shameless plug, but very relevant.

 

There are lots of free directories where you can submit your site/forum for free, without having a link back.
So search for these

 

Nice, but do they send at least some traffic? Ps: searching term should be "free directories" ?

 

Build backlinks, advertise, press release.

 

Won't send you traffic (most of the time), but it's good to increase your pagerank (and SEO in general, which will send traffic as well eventually)
If you want traffic you're better with doing link exchange and post exchanges, and post on other forums with a link in your sig.

 

Try starting some kind of contest to give away free stuff to the people who post the most often.

 

Try asking some personal online forum friends, make sure you don't break other forums rules though. Get some good members in, and ask them for advertising help.

The more advertisers the better.

 

Yfcadmin has an awesome directory submission service, I've had good experiences with him. It's important to get nice organic traffic, and directory links can help... no need to put most of them on your site, a lot of them are free.

Get people to build content. Huge factor in keeping visitors. Start contests.

 

one of simplest and best way is the siggy.....
join some forum...dont break their rules...

 

but not many people click sigs... i will post on some forum a month, 10 will click sigs and 1 of them will join my forum lol

 

Start off with a site with good content, it will pull people into the forum.

 

yeah that also works, or get some RSS feeds goin

 

post 3 or more relevent threads a day & submit to 5 directories a day.