How would you market a forum?

I have just set up a Animation Forum.

It not my normal type of site, i usually develop ecommerce and database driven turnkey sites and have no idea how to market this one.

I have done the seo url mod rewrite to the site and i can easily get keyword backlinks for the site but what i want to know is if i get traffic to an empty forum will visitors automatically start posting or do i need to fake interest and set up new users and make up some topics to get it started?

your ideas please

 

You may find this post interesting

 

Starting a forum is two fold and really both are needed to get a forum off the ground

#1 You need traffic. I know duh! every site needs traffic to become popular.
#2 You need posts. Traffic with nothing to read/contribute to will just surf on by.

I would say the first thing to work with are a good selection of posts by posters that know that they are talking about, for the kind of forum your trying to launch tutorials are always good espeically as they will have SEO value in the future. Now at this point you may have to create several accounts yourself and talk to yourself for a bit The quality of these early posts is VERY important.

While doing these "launch" posts just to make the forum not look empty do the usual adding your site to directories, any niche ones for your area are always good to do first. Get the XML Sitemap submitted to Google and Yahoo.

If there are other forums on your niche start posting on those with a signature link to your forum, again the quality of these posts are important, if you post good things to other forums some people will click your link to see what your advertising, especially if say you post a link to a tutorial they are looking for.

Keep talking to yourself and if you have any friends with enough knowledge not to stick out like a sore thumb to do some posts as well.

If you are contiuing to post on others forums and getting a good reputation you can start PMing some users of that forum asking them to join yours DO NOT SPAM pick a couple of people who may want to become moderators asking very nicely something along the lines of "I've started a forum, we are trying to grow it but it would really be great to have a couple of experienced moderators to help". If they agree perhaps suggest they start putting an ad in the signature.

Hopefully this will be enough to start getting the ball rolling.

Now someone somewhere I imagine will mention paid forum posting, personally I think your forum is too niche to get started by this but once its starting to get some momentum it may be worth it, just beware keep an eye on the paid posters like a hawk, you will get some great posters but you will get some that are a complete waste of space, the more niche a forum the less it can tollerate bad posts. Weed out bad posters quickly. While general paid posting services may not be right, getting some quality tutorials written for you or get one or two posters who know about animation to post may work.

Going back to #1 once you have content you can advertise your site similar to most other sites and I'm sure others can give you so great tips on that.

Jen

 

Hi, there are many forum owners who start first by getting paid forum posters to start posting in their forums. The whole idea is to create some buzz. Frankly, when your forum is new, people are skeptical and wonder if there is going to be any excitement there, but if you can get hold of some experienced posters to write some interesting posts to start the ball rolling, it would attract real forum posters. For a start, you can check out our Services section here to hire someone.

Of course, there are other means of traffic generation such as social bookmarking, article marketing and so on. You can find them in details in my free report. All the best!

 

#1 You will need interesting contents.
#2 You will need content that involves participation.
#3 Actively participate in the forum, to create a live environment.

You can leave the others to SEO/word of mouth. Bring your friends and family to get along.

Another way to start a forum is to have a strong usage site. When time comes, you can start a forum and im sure you dont have to do much to start the forum's engine. It will be flooded with traffic and fans of your site.

 

There are many ways.

First your site must be SEOed
Pay people to post
Pay people to market this by using some other traffic generation ways

etc.Hope this helped you.

Regards ah.

 

The most important thing is to have content. I agree with asking others to help you out, you can post under a few different names yourself. Pay others to not just post new threads but discuss. Talk to blogs with similar topics that do not have their own forums and try to get them to link to you.

 

How about getting a list of animation schools and submitting press releases to them?

Find other animations forums as well, and do the usual forum thing... read, identify, build relationships, give them something for free that has backlinks in it to your own forum.


Hope that helps.