This is a question for all the many (i'm sure) message board admins there are here: What do you find is the best way of attracting new users? Paid advertising, word of mouth, link exchanges, google...? This ties into some advice I need. I have worked tirelessly setting up (and modding) a web development forum at web.fusionnx.com. However, hardly anyone has visited, and no one is ever going to know it exists- what is the course of action I should take? With breathless expectation,
85% + of your traffic & growth will be a result of the traffic you receive from the search engines. Depending on your market PPC (Adwords for example) can drive decent traffic - just don't use the content network
You also need a lot of regulars. These are the people that keep the forum busy and convert visitors to members. If you aren't lucky enough to have a lot of regulars you can pay people, trade posts with people, etc. A great resource is also www.theforumzone.com which offers specific support for forum owners.
You're in a competitive market and basically paid advertising will be necessary with someone making sure EVERY post is answered. Try VBWebmaster if you have a vBulletin forum. www.vbwebmaster.com. We join webmasters to work together, not compete with each other. It's a win win situation.
I have started a forum 9 days ago, i'm in the top of google and msn, but my keyword phrase ("Teenage Writers") is not searched a lot so doesn't bring me any traffic maybe 1 unique visitor a day. What did bring me a lot of traffic was going to yahoo and post a message and link on every yahoo group related to my topic. After that I went to forums related to my topic and replied to threads with my site in my signature ( in bold ) also I send some emails around to my friends. I noticed 3 days long that I got a nice flow of traffic ( 80~100 ) and a conversion rate of 8% , so after three days I had arround 23 members and they all were posting, after that I stopped with going to forums and yahoo groups and just let it be, but traffic never stopped and conversion rates are now up to 10%: word of mouth advertisement, I asked people kindly in a sticky topic to help the site out, post a message on there blog, tell their friends; by sending an email arround etc.. And they did so! Oh yeah I forgot go out and find blogs related to your topic and ask the owners to go to your site and write a review about it, you will be surprised how many people are willing to do that. Good luck, Eiso
The *best* way (which is what you asked for), but not the easiest is to draw upon an existing user base and/or give them something truly unique that forces them to want to come back (for me it was the free web tools).
Eiso: Nice tips! I've got a couple of hours to kill, so I guess I could try some of that stuff now. Thanks- advice appreciated! digitalpoint: I think you *slightly* took my message too literally- best = most effective + least time consuming. Having said that, it worked for you, I love your tools and your forums are really friendly!
There's no shortcut when it comes to building/running a community. To do it right is time consuming no matter how you look at it.
I think a cobination of all these suggestions would be the answer. A forum needs a great deal of attention at the begining.
Put a quick registration form on the index that only non-registered visitors see. If you want to go farther, also place the form on board indexes and the threads!
clever- but i've already got a chunk of space taken up with ads for non-registered users, and I don't want to scare them away with clutter. Take a look, and tell me if you thicnk the quick-reg is practical. Also, is that possible with phpbb?