Well I run a small site and forum and visits seem to be quite impressive after only six months of business...with about 1000 - 3000 hits a day.... however most of my hits are focused on the blog (front page). DO you all have any ideas as to how I can convince people to go from the site and start registering and posting in the forum? Would marketing the forum as an almost separate entity help as well? By this i mean, blog for news and forums for discussions (on the same topic off course). Ideas would be very appreciated. Thanks.
Is the link to the forum in a highly visible place? Some people may not see it, so they may miss out. Another thing you need to do is make people want to join by doing something different from other forums in your niche. Create excitement or something to make them want to join. If they comment on your blog, then they should probably want to take part in a discussion forum, so make them want to sign up on your forums.
it is difficult to make peoples to register your forum. And also most of the blog visitors won't check your forum. You want to market your forum separately or make your forum links more visible in your blog.
This should work for you...take a snippet from the most recent "hot" threads in your forum and post those in your blog. You can do this at the end of each blog post, maybe - say "Here's the hot stuff we're talking about in the forum....come and join us." Promote your forum within EVERY blog post you make and eventually people will get the message if they're landing on your blog first. Create really interesting teasers/snippets that make people want to check out your forum. Also you might want to offer a free infoproduct to members of your forum, enticing people to sign up and get a freebie that they can only receive as a forum member. Dan
First you must have already active forum such as there are many active poster. Nobody will join empty forum. Other than that,you can organize a campaign that encourage your member to recruit member. For example,if one of your member success recruit 1 member to join your forum,then you paid them $1.