have $1000 to spend on my forum?

i have about $1000 to spend on promotion my forum site webmasterpals.com ? where do i start? should i hire forum posters or just advertise?

Any help much appreciated

 

u can hire people from freelancing sites. They will promote ur site via different methods.

if possible try adwords, and see what kind of results u get

 

does anybody where i can find those freelancers? i need trusted people to work

 

Don't buy paid posts.
You need to build loyalty with real members.
This takes time but is worth it.

 

thanks for your advice how much time it takes to build a forum with atleast 100 members. but where to go for content in my forum?

 

It should take 10 minutes. 100 members is a tiny blip if you actually have $1000 to spend. Even if you only had $10, you shouldn't have any trouble getting 100.

DON'T HIRE FORUM POSTERS. Holy shit. A forum is a community, theres no point in PAYING people to participate. The only way they'll get anything out of it is if they're doing it because they want to, not because they're paid to.

Get a site designed - its ugly now, I closed the window. Pay for advertising - put up banner ads, text ads, anything on relevant sites.

 

I think you have way too many forums. You should start out with 4 or 5 and then let them get populated.

 

true that

social bookmark

 

I would get a custom style to start off with before doing Anything else

 

I've run a forum before and it doesnt matter how great your community is people will not come and stay with it looking active, noone wants to go to a dead forum....they want to go to a live forum and then participate so I'd hire forum posters then I'd do social bookmarking...Nothing worst than going to a forum with 69 posts

 

I will highly advice you to remove the pesky php SSID from your url's. They are very bad for SEO.

Also try to put something more than what it is there on the site. The webmaster forum is too much saturated with high content forum, so why will someone leave WMW, SP or DP and go there ?

 

Yes you definitely need to get a design going. You need to brand yourself so people don't think you are just another forum. I would do that and then spend the rest advertising on related sites/blogs/etc. Like some of the others said, Adwords can really help out if you know what you are doing.

 

Advertising. Forums need alot of advertising if your going to get members.

 

You definitely need a design for the website, and especially need to cut down the amount of different sections you have there are too many to start with.

Expand the amount of sections you have each month or each 100 members or something, you could add a new section.

Ways in advertising and promoting the site, well there are numerous ways, i would not bother with SEO as this will come when the forum gets busy. You need to use the basic ways like press release and yahoo groups and yahoo answers, however this definitely wont be enough either.

Forums are hard and as others have said you need quality members that will contribute majorily to the website, however they wont and can not do this if there is no one to talk too.

Have a look at this site, you may be able to steal a few ideas from it, however its main focus is SEO.

http://www.back-links.org

I would try creating links with other companies in the same market, perhaps pay to be a vendor for some companies and get sponsored by companies.

Advertise on larger companies in the same market sector, however make sure you watch your budget here and make sure these companies supply ligitimate proof as to the traffic they are getting and how targetted the traffic is if its coming from search engines then it should be quite targetted however if its referral traffic then i doubt it would be any good.

Hope this helps

Will.