I launched my forums about making money online maybe a month ago. So far, the main way for getting members to it is by posting in forums and letting people know they can a advertise in certain sections. HOWEVER, I been trying to think of a great way to bring in more members that start more discussions. Where do I find these people? Any ideas would be great.
I was once part of a forum owners circle that committed to posting on each others forums, this worked well, but the demands of the group was very high wanting 200+ posts/month in order to remain in the group. If you are interested it was part of the aardvark series of forums, I will need to do a search, but I will post back here.
http://www.aardvarkinternet.net/chat/index.php?sid=690ff5774087e1eb01752e8631f3640e there you go, maybe there are other schemes like this knocking about on the internet.
Hiring posters is just people wanting to earn money. So they post. I want real genuine members that are there to discuss working at home. that sounds pretty cool. let me know if you find it
Give some thing FREE to join and post at your forum. I own a make money online forum and I give FREE report for people joining at my forum (Check my second sig!). Just started by Dec 4 and it is ramping now! It was the popular URL at stumble upon on 31 dec! There are lots of make money online forums. Join at them and your signature will get you traffic in longrun (Don't expect tons of traffic as soon as you joined in those forum!). Try to give some worthy freebie! FREE always works! Wishes to get many members. Also contests may help! Hey, you're my competitor! Forget about what I said!
Before you expect your forum to do well, why don't you ask yourself, "Why would anyone want to use my forums over digital point or MoneyMakerGroup.com forums?" I Guarantee you won't be able to answer that question well, as both of those sites already have countless thousands of members and active discussions. I'd make a new site, theres no way you're going to succeed in simply another money making forum.
Give your users some genuine, new, exclusive content... try draw them back with something that keeps changing or keep adding stuff making them come back to check back for more. Run a contest, a referral contest would be your best bet, or a posting contest where you have to have x number of posts to enter. Submit to directories, LOTS OF THEM... Go for social bookmarking like StumbleUpon, Digg etc also. Keep posting in your forums also and try get your friends to join up and post, make it active. You could try hiring some posters just so that you start getting some more content in there to make it look more appealing to people, sure they wont come back but content is king and they will give you that Also optimize your forum for SEO so that people will find your site easier through search engines Hope this helps!
Instead of hiring posters, start a paid to post -promotion. Offer something like 0.5-2 cents for each post and advertise it on other gpt-forums.
You could hire quality forum posters to start great topics or create a contest where the member with the highest number of posts wins or the first to reach 1,000 posts wins.
Optimization of your forum is the best to get visitors and try to optimize it in each category wise .
Oh my. You said to quit it and make a new site just because there's other really popular forums about the same thing. That's crazy and I'm not doing it. My main site is about making money online. I'm making decent money with it. The forums are just an extra..where my visitors can dicuss making money, get help and advice, and advertise some.
Theres no way he should give up just because theres lots of forums out there, I mean come on DP has LOADS of members sure, but how many damn sites/site owners are there out there?... Theres no way every single person who would want to discuss making money are posting here on DP, sure there are a lot but I'm sure a lot of people would be able to check his site out too!
I'd start by offering good content on the site, maybe some hints, tips, guides of earning money and then getting the members to talk about it. Maybe create some dupe accounts and post as 5 different people to keep conversations going or make new topics. You gotta continually generate interest until the forum works for itself...
There's a program called Vumpost that Joel Comm recommended. It supposedly complies with all the terms of service, but pulls questions and answers from yahoo answers into your forum as posts! Before long the search engines notice and then when people stop by, they see activity. Usually thats the hardest part - people tend to just leave if they see no activity. http://www.vumpost.com