I've started a new forum and I want people to visit and sign up.

Hi guys and girls,

I've had an idea about a forum for a long time, and had registered a domain name a couple of years ago. Anyway, long story short, is I finally got around to building my forum.

The idea is simple. I've seen many forums where discussions get heated, people flame and then the thread gets shut down and members banned. That's fine because it violates the TOS of the forums.

However, I was thinking, what if there was a forum where people can go and start a flame war, cuss people out, rant about politics, basically whatever floats their boat, and don't get banned.

Hence the idea for [URL REMOVED BY MOD] was born.

I've just started the forums a couple of weeks ago and I've tried myself to populate some posts, but as you all know, a forum isn't a 1 man show.

So, my question is, I'm willing to spend some money on the forums. Perhaps $500 or so, but may extend to $1000 if I feel it's worth it.

How do I drive visitors to my site?

Another problem is, that if I do drive visitors to my site right now, they will see it as fairly empty, so what can I also do to boost up content so that when people do come, they see something compelling and can start posting immediately.

Any and all suggestions are welcome. I do know getting a forum to a healthy, self sustaining forum is not easy, but I am willing to throw some money at it to give it a kick start. As of right now, I'm not thinking much of advertising on the forums, I can sustain the forums myself even if it gets to a couple of hundred dollars a month of expenses, but if this thing explodes I may think of other avenues.

Anyway, looking forward to all the comments from the experienced members of this forum.

 

First of all you need few posters who can post into your forum.
Only 1 poster can create multiple accounts and make posting like from different people.
It will make your forum alive and you'll start getting Search Engine traffic.

I can do this task for you. PM me or post your email here.



Thanks

 

I've had exactly 2 strangers sign up to the forums. Other than that I have 2 accounts, and the rest are friends and family. But I will PM you and we can discuss this off line.

I am still looking for advice though

 

You can try craigslist's rants and raves section. It's designed to get people all out of shape with rage toward each other. Just read some of the racist posts there. Unbelievable. Seriously, post a few ads in NY section of R&R and maybe you'll get some folks to your forum that way.

 

Try hiring a few good writers to write some really controversial stuff and then tweet about it or comment on a FB page.

You do need to be careful though as getting racist and hate posts could cause you problems. You certainly don't want to be putting Adsense on a forum like that.

 

I agree with Widdico.. it could cause some problems.. you need to make sure that you have set guidelines with people who write hate postings and racist statements. When it comes to marketing.. it's best to go with SEO marketing and classic word of mouth. Using social book marking and news sites like Reddit and Digg can also build your site. You can hire writers to start things going but that might not be worth it instead find moderators that support your idea and forum. Lastly don't plan on making a ton of money from this forum right away.. it should be a labor of love instead of profit because it's not going to be easy to earn money from.. Best of luck!

 

You might want to try to market the site with a topic and use the rule free section as the main attraction. I know that worked really well with a website called d2jsp who created a section called the battle floor. The battle floor was for the users who were banned/angry with moderates/bored. It limited insults to scare off tamer members and allowed the focus of the site to remain on other things, but it also let people interested in insulting each other still have their fun. It also kept banned users still on the site.

Actually, send me a PM. There is a guy I know who kept the names of all the people who used the battle floor and might be interested in trying to revive it on your forum.

 

Go to your local school and hire a group of students. I guess this will be a fun summer project for them while not costing you arms and legs.

 

It's nothing new... and I love the fact the mod's removed your spammy URL in post LoL... it's called trolling and there's many sites dedicated to this... forums are old and out dated anyway... try something new.

 

You can also try this. Find a few forums with lot of content. Then hire a good programmer and create a crawler that will copy the content from those forums, merge it and fill your forum’s database. The crawler itself is quite simple software and it takes about a few weeks to create it.

 

That's a good idea, I will try out Craigslist. Thanks for the tip!

 

Can you please recommend to me where I can hire such writers? As I said, I am willing to pay, but I don't want to pay out of the wazoo!! Slow and steady and lets see where the forum leads.

 

I've read in several places that forums take 1 to 2 years to "mature", and I'm willing to wait that long.

As for advertising and Adsense, yes, I agree that such a forum would cause an Adsense account to be banned, but I'm not thinking of monetizing this right now. I want first a very busy forum, I will think of monetization at a much later date.

 

I think the moderators, were a bit too harsh in penalizing me.

My intention was not to "spam".

I disagree that forums are "old". If that was the case, digitalpoint would be on another "platform". Forums have their place and are a good meeting ground.

 

Hi z00100,

You can send invitation to hundreds of people for registering. If you have not so many contacts then you can PM me. In my Email there are around 13 thousands Email ID added.

Best of Luck

 

Just tired of seeing people say, "Hey, i've got this question, in the meantime, visit my site and signup". That's not what this section (or forum) is about. If you wanted a website review, you posted in the wrong category.

Besides, I don't get mad when passing out infractions, view them as warnings, nothing more.

 

If you are looking for content writers to hire, you can try using PostLoop

 

Which one is the site review forum? Trust me it's hard to figure everything out right away. To me, at first, this thread looked like the right place to ask people to review my site.

 

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=23 - That one is.

 

I still disagree with you, I think you were harsh in just slapping me with an infraction. Don't forget, this is a big forum with complex rules, people make mistakes.

Anyway, you're the moderator and you're right (since this is your forum), and I don't want to argue much.

You have your opinion and I have mine, but I've learned my lesson.