How are you guys promoting your forums?

Other than the obvious "use a paid forum posting service", does anyone have good tips on how to get a forum going? Nothing sadder than a nice new forum with 0 posts...

 

start adding content. Make people come for that special content that you only can give them. People will eventual sign up. Also make some form of contents to give a start to the forum.

 

I have the same problem Sonic, I have had my forum since like August, as of today I have like 10 posts. They seem to grow very very slowly. I even have a PPC campaign to try bringing visitors. I have emailed several sites with related content about the forum. (Almost all wrote me back saying they did NOT like my thoughts and the forum, as it took visitors away from there site) I even had a link exchange request, to offer bringing traffic to their sites also.

I ve posted to a few newsgroups with related subjects, 95% of them emailed me back - FLAMES saying I was rude or violated their rules since my post 'advertised' my sites url.

 

Make a lot of posts on similar forums. Just regular posts. NOT spam posts advertising your board. Make sure your link is in your sig line. You can get away with spamming if you're discreet about it.

Submit to as many forum directories as possible.

Join a forum webring.

Have a contest. The better the prize, the more people you will bring in. Graphics contests are always fun. Referral contests and posting contests are good too.

Add uique content to draw in people and keep them coming back.

Add an arcade to keep people coming back. Get some rare games that are not on a lot of forums. (I know where you can get 3000+ games - Pm me for a link to a great source.)

 

I'm in basically the same boat. I had a forum for awhile, there was a problem with it and I stopped working on it. In the end I had around 10 members that weren't active.

The beginning of the year, I decided to get the forum back up and running, but as to date, there are only 2 members (including me!). I'm thinking of giving up altogether on the whole forum idea.

 

Forums are a bit hard to get up and running. They seem to be easy but infact they are one of the most hard website to get up and running. I have a forum and I am working very hard to get it up. Right now I am searching for partner ships with other similar related website and I have already 2 interested! ;-)

 

I've had a forum connected with my site for 3 months or so, now. I have 25 members...about 5-7 are really what I would call active. Out of my 25 members, 4 have their own forums with similar numbers as well. I am mainly into affiliate marketing, another does reselling, 1 is an MLMer, and the other two have a few interests. We have thrown around the idea of "combining forces"....creating just one forum and bringing all the members along...creating a forum that has "Mods" who specialize in each area....to see if we can build more interest.

Jim

 

Yeah, no wonder. That's not the right way to do it. But you're close. I mean, look at what you're doing here at DP. You've got hundreds of posts under your belt, and the post you just made isn't about your site, it's just you communicating. You're sharing your (unhappy) experience. That's useful.

So the question is, why isn't a link to your forum in your sig? Why don't you have a sig? You could be making on-topic posts full of interesting comments, and your little sig could sit at the bottom of your posts, whispering, "Psst! Over here!"

And that's probably a much better way to post to newsgroups, too. You post on-topic and never plug or link to your own site. But your sig has a link, natch.

-Tony

 

Having thousands of posts in many forums, and being actively active in one forum right from the start, which has now around 100,000 members in less than 18 months I can safely say few things:-

1. Be unique and offer something which other don't offer.
2. Make the user special, I mean make a community, not a forum.
3. Make him feel like he is getting something from the forum.
4. even if your forum is small, make some members mods,so they too can promote the forum.
5. Starting some current hot topics which makes user to come in the discussion.
6. keep some kool and good features(depending on the type of audiance you are targeting)

If all this fails, than make your forum a porn sharing forum . I promise that you will get thousands of users from all over the world in just few month(half of them will be Indians though )

Best of Luck

 

A few clients using my article submission service seem to be writing articles based on the target audience of their forum and then at the end of the article saying something like "Discuss this further at domain.com/forums".

It is a good assumption that if somebody has read to the end of the article and enjoyed it they may want to read/write some comments about it.

 

Thanks for all the input. Some great tips in this tread so far.

With forums I always think of saying "Nothing attracts a crowd, like a crowd". But how do you get the crowd, without the crowd? That's the problem

 

You're right, it's a chicken & egg problem. And it 100% applies to forums.

However, other things attract a crowd. In the case of a forum, it really helps to have a service outside of the forum itself. What industry is your forum about? Create a service that people in that industry will use. Even a single extra excuse for people to be on your site will grow things dramatically.

And by "service" I don't mean "blog" or "shop." I typically think of some kind of form that people use to get back something meaningful. For example, if your site is about music, you might provide a lyric finder. If your site is about cars, you might provide a dossier of every car ever made (or every car in your niche). If your site is about games, you might provide a searchable cheat code database. Etc.

-Tony

 

It is very difficult today since there are millions of forums on the internet for people to post on, so getting big is a large task!

Even within the webmaster space there are hundreds, maybe thousands of forums now!

 

I just opened Find A Forum last night, you can have a free link...

details here http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=54282

 

Nice site man!

You need to start adding forums to that quick, even if they don't submit

 

post in other forums... coz forum users may have intrest in ur forum too... but 1st add alot of content

 

thanks mate, I appreciate that.

I am only adding the ones that submit via PM's for the moment, because I need to get the forms set up still

47 links to go

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=54282

 

I keep a list of forums at http://www.topwebsitetips.com/Forums.aspx. I promote the forums on this list as a way of gaining links and traffic to your website. If you are interested you can check to see if being included on this list might work for you and if you qualify to be listed.

The sites that I list must be SEO friendly, and allow links in signatures. This is a relatively new page but I do get some decent traffic to it.