Hey guys, I'm getting ready to launch a forum and I'm considering buying posts. I've heard from a few people that buying posts is bad for a forum on it's launch. What do you think? Any other good ways to promote a forum to encourage member signups?
If you have the money to spend, and you're going to buy something in inflate your site, it might be better to go after text links to get your site ranked so that people will find your forum and respond. In the meantime, you should hang out in the social areas of the web to promote your forum.
See, that's what I was thinking...... And as far as text links, anyone have any good recommendation on where I could purchase them? I'm not working with a huge budget at all, so I guess I'd be looking for cheap text links on sites within the same niche.
will add a text link to my website for only 2 dollars. The only problem is that my website is completly different from yours. Its a website about morocco and friends of morocco, its pr 2 now I raise the visits from 45 a day to over 300 a day. if you are interested i will even add an image link to the first page for 5 dollars a month. Let me know if you are interested. BTW the website will be receiving over 5000 hits a day soon, i m working on a very popular card game that is supposed to bring a lot of traffic. Abdu
Buying posts isn't a bad idea, but the problem, as people before me have put it, is bringing the forum back to life when the paid posters are gone. You could put up a contest of sorts- with prize money in cash or kind.
Start getting some unique decent articles related to your forums niche and posting them in a News, Tutorials type section and get backlinks directly in to that section. Typically paid posts are low value like, "Hey nice forum just joined up" and offer nothing in the way of targeted keywords/ranking. Organic search referrals are very powerful, and it doesn't take much to start pulling long-tail traffic. If you offer something unique this long-tail traffic will register and start writing content for you which will in turn pull more traffic. Once you can get this happening, it will snowball.
buying post is not very good idea, i think you should put half the money in buying post and half the money in SEO, and try to put up some good , unique and demanding on your forum.. it will attract the new sign ups and will be good for a long term business.
Thanks for all the good ideas guys! My forum is going to be based on the niche of my site, which is about companies that hire people to work from home and offers tips on how to get started working at home, work at home opportunities, etc. Basically, I'm hoping that the traffic from this forum would get more traffic to my website, as the forum is an extension of the site. I think I'll skip on buying posts and try to gain users and do some sort of contest. That seems to be a unique way to get people to come on board and contribute.
Visitors are always expecting many post when they join a forum, you can do that your self of you can do that by use of other people.
it has both good and bad sides. as others said above, people might wonder whre everyone left when the paid posters are gone, thats the bad part. then again, if you have an empry forum - no one will be interested in joining thinking this place is deserted. you need to do both, buy posts at the beginning to give your forum a jumpstart and at the same time keep marketing the site so that you get real visitors joining
I agree. What are some other good ways to market a forum as such, other than just buying some text links, holding contests, etc.? Would any of you suggest going to other similar boards and joining up and posting steady and place your forums link in your signature? I think this could pull in some new users, but then again, running a forum is new ground to me.