Hi DP users! I need some feedback on ideas for recruiting members to a forum, or increase member activity. What types of contests are good for a forum? I already have an idea for a prize (a free one or two-month membership to our service). The first thing that comes to mind is to have a contest for the user with the most posts in a week or so, but that would promote a lot of low quality posts. I could also create perhaps some polls on the posts where people can vote for the best answer, similar to Yahoo answers. Any ideas? I appreciate your feedback!
First thing to consider is that most people are totally lazy. Unless you have an active, loyal member base your content will fall on its arse!
From my previous experiences with forum contest - dont do it. The rewards are limited and people are lazy. I gave away a prize that was worth $175 for an article writing contest and only got 2 entries. Another contest I held, had the same results. If you want to spend some money, spend it on advertising or other marketing outlets.
How about the person with the most helpful post as voted on by members or chosen by you (you could set up a voting post) over the course of a month gets free advertising on the site the following month.
I think you should tell us about your forum topic, because you could image different contests in different topics.
pay people to post to up the content/members or buy a forum db and import it to make your forum look established.
I am paying people for posting, but it isn't very effective. Maybe it's for me low payments, but I think that I am offering exactly what I can to offer, because where is no point to overpay...
Yeah, I think contests are great if you already have a userbase. But, for something totally new it can be difficult to get the activity level needed to generate new interest. My recommendation would be paid advertising + paid forum posting.
If your wanting more forum post, set up a RSS posting bot. This will post articles from RSS feeds that you tell it to. I dont know what kind of forum software you use, but this feature is built into VBulletin. And bots work for free. You dont have to worry about them leaving, flaming other members or trolling.
How about a referral competition. The person who refers the most amount of new members between x and y months is the winner. You could add that each new member must make at least 20 posts for that new member to count as a valid referral. There are referral mods on vb.org that you can install.