Promoting forums

Hey guys,

What are the best ways to promote forums? iPhoneYabber just recently opened up the forums (http://www.iphoneyabber.com/forums/) however as you can see it hasn't really took off.

So I need some ways to get it going.

Thx,
Nick.

 

It is very, very hard. Forums are one of the most difficult sites to advertise and get people to join and post.

Start off with post exchanges. You should also get all of your friends to posts and buy paid posts, the more the better.

The thing is, no one will join and post in an empty forum, so you have to populate it.

 

Alrighty, thanks.

 

I searched for iphone forum in google and found hundreds of forums concerned iphones. What I see is hundreds of forums and very limited users. You need to have something different to attract users. Come up with unique how-to or software and submit those to sites like digg. Promote those articles on other iphone forums in your signature. People don't usually click on a link for kicks, they are interested in something.

 

what adman said is true, a forum needs content, a niche that people are dieing for.

I own a coding / gaming forum , and i added a section called UGA , and to access the section, you would need 50 posts. (I would put like secret hacks and stuff in the section). Thus getting new members and making more active.

 

Search engines are cool, sig links in other forums are also alright.

I just launched a contest where members refer members and get paid for it. If this works well first month I may workout an affiliate program. Why not spend all your advertising money to members in the community?

 

I am going through this exact problem right now. Getting people to sign up is tough - but activity gets more activity. It is basically a snowball effect...

Contests seem to work well.

 

I have 160 members after 3 weeks ,650 posts (about 250 are mine ) and 60 topics (35 are mine )
what do you think ?has my forum taken off ?

 

You can get a lot of help and advice here: http://www.adminfuel.com/

Take a look. There are various ways of hitting your target market - join other forums and have a polite link in signature (following forum rules). Post exchanges, link exchanges, contests. A lot of things to discover!

 

how many of them are active?

 

Promote your forum with a Street Team
How to get backlinks from forums and blogs and not be labeled as a spammer
threadsoup.com could possibly help as well...it's a forum based social bookmarking site, though, the majority of it's members are admin... I don't use them.

 

I've recently started a forum (5 weeks ago) and I'm all clued up on forum theory lol.

Don't have too many empty sections. Try and group them in to less sections that appear more active. 5 sections with 200 posts in each looks much better than 20 sections with 50 posts in each. Members won't stay on your forum if they think it's dead.

Submit your sites to google/yahoo/msn.

Upload a sitemap to google and yahoo.

Try and swap links with other forums of similar content although that's sometimes hard to do.

Generate as much new content as possible. If the spider/bot doesn't see new content every time it visits, it will take longer to return to your site.

I use rapidshare a lot and have started putting my forum url in every link that I upload and post on rapidshare forums. I also make the url the password for the .rar files. It get's your forum noticed in other areas.

Hope this helped.

 

basically people tend to visit forums that are active or 'seem' active. So the first step would be to populate the forum with posts, then only advertising it.

Perhaps writing tutorials, articles, and partnering with other sites helps big time.

 

great suggestions here, definitely helpful. I understand the key is "load forums, then advertise"!

 

good thread, will use the ideas offered here!

 

Well logically, that would be the case.. You wouldn't go visiting some dead forum would you? You'll only go to one that's active and you KNOW you'll get some response for your threads.

 

I think my business forum is starting to get there as far as activity goes. I would like to know what others think?

Col

 

As mentioned by some of the members, forums are one of the most difficult things to market...
yet some of the marketing techniques can be used for marketing like contests.. zazzy names... or some out of the ordinary stuff...