I need as many tips as possible. I've always found it difficult in the past and I'm in the process of setting one up now. It's a bit of a vicious circle, people won't sign up with 10 members on the board so you never get anywhere! If everyone who visited the site just signed up it would be so much easier
set up your forum and then get teh ball rolling... To get the ball rolling unfortunately you need to "write a book". This means creating fake accounts and talking to each other. Lucky for you, you can hire contractors very cheap to help, but in my experience quality post are hard to come by. You can also try running contest and giving away free prizes to the winners.. this will help participation. Once you get several post, you can try turning off the site to visitors and only allow logged in users to view post... this will increase your sign up rate, but in my experience it is not worth it, as SE's can't index the pages. Good Luck
I agree with this, I am 50 people at my forum even though I have members now I still talk to myself on there.
Take swordfish's advice. To get my first community going, I made another member "liberal" and debated with myself. LOL I told people from work about the forums, and some of the decided to sign up. I really did not enjoy logging into 2 names and writing stuff that I do not believe in, but hey, it got things going. Now I have such a hard time trying to keep up with all the posts. I started another forum in January 07 and I haven't put enough time into it yet..I am not interested in signing up multiple accounts so I made the choice to purchase some paid forum posting. That got things going...
Start a forum which you know a lot of stuff about. Start with only a few forums so your site would not look all empty. Getting two usernames would help, I do that in my forum too But using two names got me confused sometimes, hehe.
The most important thing is to have activity there when visitors arrive. Paid posting, posts exchanges, talking to yourself, they all work.
I have found it's best to start a forum by creating a product first. You then get interest in what you do and regular visitors, and then you give them a place to discuss. With already having a user base it doesnt require much more effort to get a forum moving.
Thing is with talking to my self though, it's a PS3 forum and I'll pretending to be someone else will be hard, especially if someone wants to play online with me!
I have many accounts, but it is still a slow grind. I am about to sign up for some paid posting programs to help.
Adding some good mods to your forum is always a good way to make it stand out more. There are tons of the out there
One of the best ways to start a new forum is to use some software called ICO Content (created by T0PS3O). It pulls threads from Yahoo Answers and makes your forum look totally natural. I used it to kick off a few forums and they are all full of great content after a couple of months. It also avoids having to hire unreliable forum posters. See the top link in my sig (aff) for details.
vBulletin is probably more popular, can't really say its better. Peoples opinion that is, everyone likes what they like. I have just realised that it is only avalible for vB, and SMF. If I had to choose I would choose vB.
So with ICO does the software create new usernames automatically? I'm guessing it uses the same user names that are used in Yahoo Answers and if someone replies then the same user name is used on the forum to reply?
It creates the users using the same names they have on yahoo and when somebody replies it posts under their Yahoo name as well. It couldn't work any better really.
So have you got loads of genuine members/posts/threads on the forums you run it as a result then? Or is it still ICO creating all the content?