How can I increase user participation on my forum?

Hi people, please I have a forum that has good content but a very low user participation in the form of postings and replying to posts. Even when I set up a system to reward posters, I still get very low response from them. It is also difficult to get new members to register as they just use the resources on the site and leave. How can I make them participate more on the site? Valuable suggestions will be appreciated. This is a link to my site for reference https://classhall.com/discussions

 

Restrict the forums from public view, require certain amounts of posts before they can gain content.

Advertise/market your forum and the content on your forum.

 

Personally, I don't think Restricting public view will help in increasing forum participation rather it may hurt it. If i get any such forum where registration is compulsory before viewing the content i just close it down and move ahead.

Offering some positions, rankings or some surprise gifts will help you to engage your forum members to be active on your forum. You can also start some competition to attract new registrations.

 

hold contests with nice rewards?

 

HI
Make sure that new topics comes frequently, so that viewer see new threads and posts, promote it well,so that you get you increase you user registration rate .

 

Using pay per post workers, some kind of contest may do the job also

 

Thanks all for the useful suggestions. I will welcome more

 

I have a forum and i have implemented SMF forum, how to increase the number of forum contributors. Please review the site <a a href="http://www.interview.ind.in">interview.ind.in</a> and then provide solution that is appropriate to my forum.

 

contests and awards are good things

 

What you are experiencing is called the ghost town syndrome. The best way to get a new forum running is to pay a group of people to be extremely active on the forum. This needs to be sustained until you have enough users attracted to the forum and active that you can back off on paying a group to be active.

Works like a champ but can get expensive.

 

Organizing a community driven giveaway is the working technique to increase activity in your forums. Create some VIP access area, where you can provide rare tricks, products or ideas. Create a community of VIP peoples with secret talks like as business ideas, money making tips & more. Those are proven methods for a forum owners to make it huge success.

 

I just peep on your forum.For me your forum is not interesting and it not user friendly.
Try to make you forum user friendly.

 

VERY BAD IDEA.

There is NO way that I would sign up for a forum without FIRST seeing what I am signing up for.

 

All of the above are bad ideas.

Perhaps your forum never offered anything of value to begin with. Most successful forums are launched on web sites that had content that drew repeat traffic and offered something of value. For instance, think of a Photoshop Tutorial web site. Thousands of people flock to the site to read tutorials. Then the web site launches a forum. What happens next? Repeat visitors start posting questions and more seasoned users start answering questions. Over a period of time you will build a steady reliable community. However, if you simply launched a Photoshop forum you would have the occasional person who stumbles upon it and MAYBE they don't notice it's a ghost town and they accidentally make a post.

You need a web site with content pulling traffic buddy.