the cheapest way to fill a forum is to import RSS Feeds as postings. Go to your admin CP > RSS Feeds > RSS Feed Manager
I am using smf, in this i have not found a rss feed manager, i have enabled the rss/xml feature but still apparently i still need to edit news.php, i am struggling with this. I Love Learning
Here is a great addon http://www.instadigi.com/index.html i have downloaded it and hope to install it over the weekend,it costs $70 but well worth it.
def worth getting a fair few posts up, when i launched my first forum i setup a fair few accounts and posted under them all to start showing there was a community building. the register button is actually quite small, have you thought about making the nav bigger? as someone said above find relevant blogs and post comments, if possible try and start a thread so there is a relevant pull back to your forum i have one forum and have about 20 feeder sites (autogenerated sites behind it pushing traffic via content) point to the forum and in fact advertising the forum, these were slow initially but really picked up about 4 months after i launched them. have you thought about adding a 'fishing holidays' section, you could add quite a few threads using links from affiliate programs and write some mini reviews and again extra content which can help with serps? thought about running a competition and promoting it on competition forums? for £100 you could give away some fishing related items? good luck with it all...
Hiring people would be my suggestion. Also, why not pay for PLR articles on fishing and post them as stickies ?
I believe that "if you build it, they will come" when it comes to forums. A forum is for discussion and if you want to promote discussion, you will need at least some activity and some content.
well this is not true.. you can populate a forum without content.. you can change all your topic with word discuss or talk or shout like discuss fishing talk fishing shout for fishing then only thing you need to do is promote your forum on google adwords for fish related keywords and sites.. saying in title Discuss fishing 24/7 subtitle we waiting for you fishers subtitle register and win $1000 worth fishing tools good luck
Get 10 fishing friends to join, post and interact with community members. Consider leasing a parked domain name that gets natural type in traffic when you have good content/momentum. You might want to try to spice up your signature with atricle titles that are linked to forum threads. Ex: 10 reasons to go Fishing, My fishing disaster, Bait Sucks! Google basic html code if necessary.
Lol, Im going to agree with suzy. Hire some people to start posting/make it look like the forum is active and also try to hold some competitions, or involve cash. Everyone loves cash.
Step 1. Make The Frontpage alot more web 2.0 - if you have plans to integrate the front part of your site but aren't at the moment redirect the front page to the forum. Step 2. Hire Paid Forum Posters Step 3. At the same time spend some $$ on advertising on Adwords etc Step 4. Join other forums (on the same topic) and offer good contributions and link to your forum Step 5. Repeat Step 2 - 4 Until the forum is filling up and members are joining daily and posting.
Lots of great tips, Thank You All Who Have Replied. I may decide to use a payed posting service, has any other forum owner used one of these services with success or is it a waist of money? This question is for forum owners