Best way to promote a new forum?

Anyone care to share any hints or suggestions on the best way to promote a new forum?

 

paid posters is a good start you need to get people joining up and seeing a few topics going on!!!!

thats where I would start!!!

then go into link exchanges, baner purchases, link buys..etc etc...

 

I would not really recommend paid posting. Paid posting will create content and make your site look active, but you need to really market your site and bring visitors in order to "grab them by the activity" otherwise after you are done paying, the posters will leave and you will have a "somewhat empty" with no activity forum.

Check out my blog on community / forum advice, I post about it frequently.

 

In one word, Myspace

 

Now this is facinating. Can you elaborate a little, either here or in PM? Do you mean use a guerilla technique like a "lonelygirl" or do you mean register a MySpace name with keywords that match the forum?

 

How about starting a posting and referral contest on the forum?

 

No, no, and no.

Sorry, MySpace has a smaller return ratio than asking out a sober celebrity to go down on you.

Posting and referral contests don't do shit unless you have an amazing prize for the winner. I doubt you can afford it. You're talking at least a couple $$ here. Even then, they aren't that worth it.

guerilla techniques won't work, that's pure luck.

To truly promote a new forum, there is no shortcut, it's a lot of time and work. Start optimizing the content and layout, then bring in the traffic by creating a ton of relationships and backlinks.

 

Its seems like a specialist forum (not my scene) but im sure you will get a few fanatics who will keep the forum going. Bring them in. Get to know them, form a true community & im sure you can avoid heavy marketing costs

 

i recommened you to start an affiliate program for your forum and pay $1 or $2 per lead .... you really need not to pay peoples to post , once you have good number of registrations they will automatically start posting .

 

Do this if you want to become broke fast.

OR

Pay for member numbers but not activity.

 

well ewealth doing same and they are quite successful .

 

It would really depend on the niche, 99% of the forums out there will lose money and never have it pay off for paying on referrals.

 

i dont think paid posters work very well... You could always just post under a lot of accounts.

 

Paid posters is different than paying for leads.

Paid posters at least works if you have the traffic to bring to the site while you pay people to "make it look" active.

 

if you can afford it, get paid posting and buy more inbound links. That would help, i guess.

 

Yeah I guess.

It's my opinion that a forum can become a great success without any money invested .

(besides the software/hardware costs)

 

Everything you say I've personally experienced in other forums which have failed. Thanks for lending your expertise. The forum is heavily SEO modded and feedback is that layout is good. Backlinks I can do, but when you say create a ton of relationships can you elaborate?

 

What is your forum? Hopefully it's not GadgetMadness.com, that phpBB is not optimized (no offense).

Relationships = going out and e-mailing competitors or related sites, and turning their traffic into something that you can use. This can be done with good skills in negotiating. You really just have to play around and offer things until they come back with their own offer and keep doing this until something is settled. It could be as simply as linking back to you, or setting up an advanced affiliation program. These are all based out of relationships

 

Thanks for expanding that thought. And no, the forum on GM is used more as an advanced commenting system for Movable Type. The forum I am talking about ranks #1 on Google and Yahoo for the best keyphrases that exist for the subject, I am actually currently outranking a PR8 site with my PR0 forum that is just over a week old now. My SEO Ninja skillz are there, but my current learning curve is enticing users to register and post. I really do appreciate the feedback.

 

A rather sneaky tactic me and a friend did was to register with all possible competitors and then rummage through the forum to see who was posting good stuff and behaving themselves.

We then PM'd these people a polite message with a link to our forum

Yes, we got booted from a few forums but our forum ended up with about 200+ members in a few weeks...