It's Tough Getting a Forum Started!!

I need help!! What can I do to increase traffic?

>> http://ejobforum.com

Thanks for any suggestions you may have.

 

To start you can get a signature Sigs are great for getting traffic (if done correctly).

Link trading, and other practices (if done with related sites) can also help.

Submitting to directories, and search engines can also help, as placing in the SERPS should be one of your goals...

Check out the Directories, Link Development, General Marketing, and Buy, Sell or Trade forums here on Digital point for some other cool tips and tricks.

 

Thanks for your reply. I already have a few websites with decent traffic, but this is my first try at building a forum!



The dynamics are a little different...

 

Btw, I added a signature, how come it doesn't show?

 

Also, try something like this:

http://forum-owners.com/index.php/topic,20.0.html

 

All previous posts had the box checked to not show the sig. You can manually edit all the posts in the last 8 hours, any before that are lost forever.

Not all that different. The basic concepts at least still apply.

Keep active on your own forum, and what traffic that actually converts to members will have a higher staying rate. Also be fair & just, and keep a balanced mod team. Promote the mods from within, and it will encourage others to strive to be moderators themselves

 

Related to this suggestion, we took that idea one step further and built a mod for vB (and SMF) that actually interfaces your forum with Yahoo Answers to lift relevant content into your forum.

Check out http://www.icomotion.com/ico-content/ for more info.

 

Sounds interesting. Anybody else has used this before?

 

Interesting. It looks like an interesting means of initially populating a forum with content, or keeping things ticking over. However, isn't encouraging responsive posters to sign up and participate a slightly different proposition? (Agreed it is not easy to get member to sign up to a content-less forum; but once you have the content, you still need to get people to sign up and respond to that content.)

 

register under different names and reply to your self worked for me

 

Just out of interest, how long did it take for you to get your first 2000 posts that way?

 

Put your site in all forums, advertise your site..

 

People typically don't post in ghost towns or places they think will get no response, having TOOO many categories that are emplty is never godo when starting, make general ones, post ALOT and slowly move to new categories

 

lol interesting indeed, until you buy it, and then it does not work, you contact support and don't hear anything.
That is ico-content to you.

 

You could try a posting service to get things started, i'm using the following at the moment and it helps alot.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=364911

ICO-Content seems to be very flakey, i won't install it for clients anymore as it tends to not work more then it does.

 

That depends on the niche and how aggressively (and sometimes how astutely) you promote and advertise. Two years might be nearing the upper bound on the time it takes. In my experience more like 10 to15 months.

But doesn't Google just see essentially duplicated content? If several forums in a particular niche are using it wouldn't the mass of duplicated content do you more harm than good in terms of SEO? Just a thought.

 

It's partly duplicate content which will help generate new content, by getting discussions started, so it's a hybrid.

 

I'm using ico-content at the moment for vb.

It worked fine, then it stopped, but then I got it working again.

If it has stopped posting for you, but you know it is still functioning, try to set the amount of threads to post to about 200 or more.

This usually works.

Something is off with ico in that I want 250 threads created in one day on one specific subject, but then it only creates about 10 threads.

I've also notice that if I indicate that I only want 10 threads created during a single day, that it won't create any threads.


So, to get your community active, set it to about 200, maybe 175 threads a day and it should start working again.

Also, create fake names and respond to yourself and simply get content.

Spiders will crawl whatever you post on there unless you say otherwise.

Good luck.

 

I only recently started it so most of the posts are made by real members