If you had an already popular local forum but still lags behind 1-2 bigger forums that are about 2x-3x your size, how wld you go about increasing your membership and growing your forum? Any crazy ideas will be welcome too
Do not compete with them but compete with your own traffic / posts / members of previous month and try to beat it.
I promote my forum mainly through youtube and other video hosting sites. As far as I know, I am the only forum owner in my nitch that has put so much effort into this. Take this information and consider "how" your competition is promoting their forums. What areas have they left out of their promotion techniques? The areas "where" your competition has missed, that is where you should step in. My forum stats: Threads: 25,091 Posts: 276,753 Members: 6,947, Active Members: 2,195 <---- Visiting every 30 days
You could sign up with competition forums under a different username ... They will, in most cases send updates to you as well so you'll know what's going on there. Also, you need to keep an eye on their forums everyday. Spend atleast half hour everyday browsing competition forums.
When running forums you can get away with a few "no so quality' posts when compared to running a blog where all the attention is on your articles. So, perhaps a competition for the top poster of the month/week might be a way to increase post count?
Anything you can do to promote activity is the approach. I mean anything that you can think of. Contests, Giveaways, Points system, Mods...there are dozens of ways to promote. If you want open notepad and start a list of ideas that you would love to implement and do your best to one at a time complete them.
The focus should always be about improving your own message board. If you don't have a quality message board, no amount of marketing is going to get people to stick around. What I do occasionally is to go to a competing message board, become a contributor there, and then subtly recruit a quality member from that message board. I don't try to tell them to switch completely. I generally suggest that they come check out my message board. I also do it in private as well after building a relationship with that particular poster.
Don't play your competitors game, play yours. Focus, work hard, and be creative....and let them follow you.