Ive marketed many sites successfully before but i have no idea how to market a forum well does anyone have any ideas. Its a football forum if your wondering http://www.predictionpro.com.
I have an idea....give away a Nintendo Wii and Madden 2007 during a huge internet promotion. Use other huge sports forums (ESPN) to promote!
You have taken the first step with this post. Get the word out and then start posting on your forum. Get the ball rolling, and people will join in.
Ive hired 5 forum posters to post 35 messages through 3 accounts each. I cant afford to give away a nintendo wii
Building community is not easy, a lot of people have failed during the hardest stage. Promote it on related sites and through link-building, directory submission and SEO. Good luck
O yea, one more important thing, don't use a free script when your forum is the product of the page. It's fine when the forum is just something at the side.
do you have some cash to spare? if yes, get paid posting and adword to promote. (i did for my sites). and it turns out that there are some people signs up day to day but without much posting. Again, it at least help to get people sign up.
well since we're on the topic, i've recently created one that I havent yet started to promote yet. Hey headless, Im a football fan - you're a marketer - how about we exchange some posts - mine is meant to discuss specific marketing products and services. Review, rant, rave, or dis. Good or bad, discuss your experience with a particular product or service. http://www.marketeerreview.com
Write some good articles, submit to article sites and sites like digg. I did this with a few forums and it really helped me.
The marketing for forums is really different from the marketing of other websites. Lets say you get 1000 unqiue visitors from your sigs and links and other places. Because right now the Search engines see no content on your forum and they are just ignoring you from better positions. Okay now comes the human mentality. Out of that 1000 visitors 200 or so visitors are the people who need to register and become a member of your site. Now Out of that 200 visitors only 10 will register in forum as they see that there are less number of members here and less number of threads. Out of that 10 only 5 will start talking and making posts. Because as a regular forum posters we don't know but others are hesitant about posting. So okay you have 5 posts now. Again you bring in 1000 visitors from somewhere on your own. This time I think 7 will register and 7 posts will be made as there were some members and some posts in your forum. This thing goes on for sometime and in the meanwhile the SE's also see some content. So they also help you get the visitors now. The thing in forums is that once it is off the base it will not stop. But taking it off the base is the headache. Well and how to get that visitors to your site. You can read many threads with many tips here itself on DP. Thanks.
Marketing a forum is the easiest since good SEO will automatically bring in users. One of my forums seems to bring in over 2000 new users per month from Google only.
Google bots have started to search my site already (i had about 30 of them at once this morning) The reason i dont use a paid script is because if the site doesnt take im left with a paid script that im not using.
You should get some paid posters in there around 20 of them just to get the forum looking busy and so others have stuff to talk about once it is getting busy tell your friends and buy adspace on football forums and other football related sites. It may cost around $100 if you want to get the forum huge. Also I have to suggest that you take out atleast half of the forums at the start because it looks very crowded.
I'm also working on getting my forum off the ground...I recommend trying to get some expert commentary on the subject on there, so people will have good quality stuff to read, also work on getting good inbound links from related sites and use adwords if you have the budget
I've just started up a new forum using community server. Totally different platform than phpBB and vBulliten. I'm excited to see how well this thing handles, gets indexed and handles volume of users. I'm only going to "promote" it thorugh blog postings and sigs. Let's see how the thing grows Yeah, i prolly be back asking for people to post to the forum and then the contact information for forum posting companies Wish me luck!
First get some posters to post on your forum, so it won't look empty. Personally I wouldn't have that many forums showing on the index with few posts in them. Make some of them subforums, and when the subforums get a decent amount of posts then make them back to regular forums. After you get some posts in, build backlinks by directory submissions, trading links, post your link in sigs, etc. I would also post at similar forums with my link to the forum in my sig.
Word of mouth is one of the best marketing starters for a forum. Then next stop would be networking with other forums, spread the word in there. It would also help if you promote the forum using your website. Submit it to directories and bookmark any interesting threads in social bookmarking sites.
You can also try contacting other sport related websites that may be interested in linking up. Write one letter and just send it to them all, you will more then likely get more then enough bites to get things rolling.