I want some tips for promoting a general forum. I already know the usual paying people to post and contests. I currently offer a freebie for joining and run a weekly contest for members to win FREE advertising. I need more ideas and more members would appreciate some tips and if you could some members would be good it only takes a min to join.
vBSEO is something I've purchased recently. Still looking for forum posters though, so now results yet. Hopefully it works out well because it's $100/year or so.
Forums are are really hard to build specially general forums. 1. Make sure you have SEO in place for your forum. (if you are using VB there is a few good Free SEOs) 2. Make sure you have friendly urls in place. 3. Good topics so people can sign up and post. 4. Build some links 5. Submit to directories. 6. Blog about it These are some of the things I can come up with right now. Hope this helps.
I will say before inviting other create some interesting content in it , than invite other to reply all those topics and put their views . I have seen many users start inviting other but when we visit those forums most of them have 10 to 20 thread and we don't find anything interesting over there .
vbseo or directory submissions nothing gives anything for members you need to pay people some money those who post regularly hire some experts those who spend on your forum pay for some cents in bringing new members run refferal contests etc this way your forum becomes popular and more members will come themself
VbSEO is good... My constructive crit for you is this: I would have your tech, or yourself change your adsense up. You're showing competing forums right beside your posts : FORUM RELATED links http://www.webchatforum.com/search.php?searchid=23 You shouldn't invite your users to leave when you worked so hard to get them there.... Good luck!
Forums are HARD. Not impossible. Hard. 1. It helps if your topics or of interest to people 2. If you have a blog, remove the ability to comment and instead direct people who wish to comment to your forums with a direct link to a thread setup in advance for discussion related to that post. 3. Don't go crazy with sections. Start with only a couple areas (less than 5) and get those areas going first. Nothing kills a forum faster than seeing 30 content areas with 0 or 1 post each. 4. Gather a group of friends and use your forums as a "chat room" to talk about topics together. Hopefully some users will find you and join in. 5. Keep it engaging and remove spam quickly. Nobody likes a spammy forum. 6. Use other mediums to bring users -- a youtube video -- a comment in another blog A final secret? I once found a tool that would export newsgroup posts and import them directly into my PhpBB setup on a regular basis. I had a computer networking forum so I had like comp.dcom.lans.ethernet posts being put into my forum as if they were posted by my users. This got me indexed like crazy in google (250,000 pages) and brought a LOT of users to my forums. I did this for about 2 months and slowly adjusted the script to reduce the number of posts per day as real posters picked up the pace. Eventually I turned off the script completely and let the forum grow. Through maintainence eventually all the newsgroup posts expired and were removed and I had a well running forum. Just an idea. I don't remember the name of the script but googling "import newsgroup vbulletin" might get ya somewhere.