Do we need to wait for 2 years for forum to pick up? One guy is tell me that Google will pickup website , when the website is old. I am looking to market the forum. Please advice.
That will depend how you market your forum, its niche, the actual site design and the administration efforts made. What's your forum?
Its going to take at least 1 year before google ranks your site very well. And that means getting a steady bottom of page 1 or even on page 2 ranking. During that time do not expect very much traffic. After about 18 months - 2 years is when traffic starts to pick up. Between the 2 - 3 year mark is when traffic climbs at a steady pace. If you do not want to wait on search engine traffic, buy some advertising to help kick start your forum.
Two years? You shouldn't have to wait that long. If you promote your site and build links daily, it should be much less than two years.
Not necessarily. It depends on the niche of your forum. One of my forums is in an extremely narrow and targeted niche, and I launched it in February 2008. By the Summer of 2008 I ranked on page 1 for my search terms and phrases and by Christmas of 2008, I was number two or three for my main search phrase and keyword; I'm still there. Traffic to this particular forum from Google has steadily increased since about January 2009. So I achieved desirable results in a matter of months - not years. Again, it depends on your niche. Anything is possible.
Maybe I should have said "on average its going to take at least 1 year,,,,". Some forums do better, some do worse, some close before they are 6 months old, some forums traffic takes off like a rocket.
Since you're in the insurance niche, I imagine it's going to take a while unless you have a good SEO campaign as that market is very saturated IMO especially since you'll be competing against a bunch of spammers who are looking to make some quick cash off insurance related keywords.
It really depends on about a million different things, so nobody can give a definitive answer. I would say that usually it takes at least a year - maybe less, maybe more. For me it only took about 4 months to get my site/forum into Google and break the 5000 user/day & $1,000/month barriers. I put most of the stuff i did into a free HTML ebook you can read - maybe you'll get a few ideas. Basically it boils down to simple SEO, promotion, and marketing (some easy, some not so easy).
That's more like it. I was going to rebute your statement. And btw...you don't "wait"...you "work". Sitting around waiting won't make it happen. You should be on your board daily taking care of it and members. I started a new forums less than 3 weeks ago and I have 18k posts and 1.1k members already. Once I rank in serps I should have this site rolling very well. The tough part of the equation is the time it will take for Google to rank you. It could be weeks, months, or never. Often people give up and that's why there are so many dead forums. There is no guarantee a forum will make it. I believe a luck factor is involved. That's a very simple soup. I would add some more complexity to it. A forum especially is complex. It's a community which has to depend on members to be a success. I don't know any forums that are a success with a small amount of members. A forum is in essence a social club online. Before myspace, facebook, or other social sites it was forums. Forums have still not reached their peak imho for internet usage. I talk to many people offline and ask if they are part of forums. So often they say no and many are unaware of them or the benefits they offer. Still a huge amount of room to grow in the forum industry. The job is to attract people to your site (seo, promo, and marketing) then convert them to members. A base of 100 loyal active users can help a forum ride out until the search results kick in and natural traffic takes over.