As some of you might know, I started a webmaster forum a while back at 9mb.com Today it reached the 7,000th post and things are looking good. The growing process at a forum is not really fast.. It takes time to get members and get them post! This forum is now +/- 3 months old and I want to share some thoughts: To start a forum you need to be dedicated, you have to put in quite a bit of your time. You are starting the forum, so you need to post and come up with interesting subjects. If you are not posting yourself, don't expect visitors to sign up and start posting, No !! A visitor will only join if they think "mmm, nice forum, its active and there are some good discussions going on". This is the thought you need to get by all of your visitors. Once you have members, You need them to stay active. You can do this to reply again at their posts and ask them things. You can also start a contest that lasts for 2 weeks or even a month. When starting a contest you should watch out that the members will not only be there for the contest.. they contest should be a nice addon, not the main goal. Ofcourse you always get some ppl that are doing it pure for the contest... but in the time the contest is running, you need to grab their attention and let them feel the forum is a nice hangout. If you are successful at this, big chance they also come back after the contest (at least that is what I experienced). If I have any more or new thoughts/tactics, I will share it!!
Really good advice - found an AWESOME domain name for a boards site, but have been hesitant to start it due to some past failures. The main reason for my failure was my lack of 100% attention to it - otherwise I think it would have done much better. There needs to be a feeling that it isn't a 'forgotten' board or people will bolt. Thanks again for the tips!
I am currently having a little trouble with my forum. Forums aren't easy, but if I can get over the first hill, then it can probably be successful.
I have a webmaster site/forum too that i just started. Getting ready just now to start working on it.
Well done, you seem to be one of the few success stories out there, most people like to stay on the well known forums - great work there making some competition for the others - nice forum btw! I will register later on.
Thanks for the positive reactions guys !! appreciate that. yeah it takes full dedication if you want to get it succeed. But I am not here yet.. takes a long way to become successful with this forum. I did not make any profit of it yet.. only pumped money in it.. and it will be like this for the next few months I guess.. hehe
For whatever reason I have started around 5 very big blogs (20,000+posts) and it was very easy for me just takes some work and contests. I should write on article on this soon to help people out since it has been a pretty easy task
Hi, would you mind to share what types of contests were the easiest to start up? Which kind of contest do you think is the most successful? Thanks for the nice post! How much time before you gave up on them, if you don't mind me asking? You should give yourself more credit than that. You have a great talent. Not everyone will find it so easy as you say. That is an amazing amount of blogging you've done Nice work, and I'm looking forward to your valuable tips!
that is great advice, I have 18 members and 217 posts after two weeks I think that isn't too shabby, yesterday I received 923 unique visitors, all real traffic from an article I posted. I seem to be receiving a lot of good traffic from the Serps, but not many signups.. not sure why at this point, I guess I don't join many forms, so maybe I just need to keep posting good articles.. out of the 923 visitors I got yesterday I received one signup, so maybe that is a trend, every 1,000 visitors I can expect one signup?
visitors are not going to sign up after 1 article.. they need to see more stuff, yours is still small.. keep doing it this way and you get lots of signups !! that must be a great article !! about the contests: the one that got me the most new sign ups and posts was the $ 200 post contest.. it was about quality posts so spam posts would not win any prizes hehe... maybe I start another one next month! freakylime: if you start a forum, you need to post yourself the most at the beginning. 100 posts are not much, it takes more than that!
Great job, that first initial membership drive is always the toughest, I've done quite a bit of community building, and it's not easy but it pays off wonderfully in pride!
Congrats! I've not started a forum and don't really want to as of yet but when I do I will definitely think back to this thread.
Ok, I have never run a forum before so my experience is limited here, I have run a ton of other online marketing campaigns and such so I'm confused as to why I'm not converting well (meaning members). Check out my awstats for the last 3 days.. I've been posting a lot in my forum and I have 2 pretty dedicated friends who post here and there for me as well. This one article I wrote is blowing up, tons of sites are linking to it and driving a lot of traffic to my site, I just wish I could capitalize on it better. The article that people are posting everywhere has to do with Linux as a media center system... so maybe just the Linux community isn't too interested in my site? To me these numbers look good I'd expect a few people to signup and stick arround?? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Ok these stats are now wrong I just broke 1,000 unique visitors for the day!
I feel the same with you the difference is i have 50k page hits today. I also need advise how to increase members join and post.