Hey, I have tried twice in the past to start a forum for a website, everytime there is 0 posts by anyone. How do you get people posting - everyone just turns up and hits the back button as there is 0 content. Any advice? Cheers
Starting a forum is the hardest thing to do on web. If you want success: - unique ideas - lots of registered members first - new posts every hour
Pay People! Or i will join and i'll post or you can make me a forum and i'll pay you lol. i was trying to start one also!
Don't make too many topics at first, you have to make the majority of threads yourself. Make them interesting and people will participate
I have done some market research and from what I can see I would be the only provider of the service the forum would be about. Although it is quite a niche market.
paid forum posting helps get content on your site, but it is still up to you to get legit traffic to your forums
If you are not getting any visitors to your forum. Just hire some forum posters to post into your forums. Once you have build your forum database with some good posts and it gets udpated daily, people will come to your forum. You can hire some forums posters from DP itself. Just make sure they are expereinced and not doing any copy and paste from other forums.
Getting off the ground is the most difficult part. Once you have a few regular posters others will join and a community feel will develop. As others say, hiring a few posters could help, or if you have a wide circle of friends, persuade some of them to join.
I'm also planning on launching a niche message board. Mine's a little different, we are going to use the best posts for a book series. I've been on boards for years, and have found that you might have to generate the initial "buzz" yourself. Create "schticks" to post in different voices; get all your friends to do the same; buy some advertising on sites w/ compatible content (some even symbiotic). Also helps if one of your best friends runs an extremely successful site...in the top 55k worldwide (traffic). Still, with all of that, I'm in the same boat you are. If you build it, they will come only works in the movies...it's a lot of work for a shaky pay out.
I had a forum setup, within a week, i already had some traffic, spammers people that setup forums tend to have high expections...set it up, update it from time to time, keep fresh content on it, otherwise you will be dispointed and you will just remove the forum in a month, when your high expectations are not met. it takes a lot of time, and patience, sometimes even money for a good design... then you got to deal with the spammers that want to advertise their useless crap by giving you no content of any value at all. and if you are solely doing this for money, stop now, you are just setting this up for all the wrong reasons, there is no money in short term foruming, and the avg forum does not live that long because of high expectations on what they think their forum should be doing or making either in traffic or income.
The trick is katz, and phaze download and phaze porn remember, thats only for warez forums though, and it works really well, you can't submit other types to them.
Most definitely. You cannot have a robust MB w/o having constant updates. Get a list of thread ideas that you want to roll out, daily-weekly-monthly. Get your friends to commit to spending time on the site...you will need to hit critical mass. Forums themselves don't necessarily equate to $, so possibly adding feeds, news, blogs, etc will help make your forum "sticky."
http://www.forumgenerator.com/ would solve your problems. You can set it up to your keywords, number of postings/threads per hour/mins etc, loads of other stuff. Setting it up with your keywords means it will scrpae threads from other forums in that keyword and post on your site instead. Supercheap as well for what your asking. This tool would basically make it look like your forum is thriving with posters.
Articles, Social Networking and contact members of other niche-related forums. I have been doing this when I have time and I have a forum with 100+ members and a couple thousand posts. It's nothing compared to dp but it's a nice start. You also need to look at how you set up the board. You never want to have a forum with only a few topics or posts, that's the quickest way to lose people.
The thing is that their is already a popular and well established competitor to my niche. I guess this begs the question "Why bother?"...
First of all Make a Strong Group by Social Media, Social Networking Site. After Than You Make a website and Give Suggest yo your Network Member..
I have already pointed out some good techniques in this post, but here's some more: After "buying" posts from people here at DP, you should try to get your friends to post. When the forum seems to be a little active, start posting links to your forum at Facebook, Twitter, MSN, etc. Then you could try to sign up for forums with almost the same niche, and have a link in your signature which leads to your forum. Might help out!
Warez forums gets a lot of traffic...and katz and phazeddl send a lot of traffic for warez forums.. but i think if any one is interested in starting a forum for webmaster discussions its waste of time and money..