Forum Marketing

Would you like to enlist some initial steps for building community.
What is that old fashioned way?

 

Piggyback the popularity of existing similar forums if they allow
(e.g., signature promotion, ads ,etc).

 

Thanks ill check it out

 

how do i get my signature up and running so that the link becomes active!???

 

I have just started a new forum and I am in the same boat. There are some good articles on Ezine Articles on the subject, here are a few I like

http://www.ezinearticles.com/?Forums:-Jump-Start-Your-Forum-Website&id=89019

http://www.ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Make-a-Sticky-Web-Site-with-Web-Forums&id=93929

http://www.ezinearticles.com/?Jump-starting-Your-Forum-Community&id=79422

http://www.ezinearticles.com/?Some-Quick-Tips-to-Easily-Improve-the-Success-of-Your-Forum!&id=59423

 

I always like a forum with a joke thread

 

Essentially alll the methods before you could just pay people to post.

I guess this includes everything from recruiting members off of other forums to pumping your site full of content yourself to giving away prizes.

Brandon

 

Before you start promoting your forum, make it look active. Post to yourself, to your friends but more importantly, post quality content. You can supplement it with posting services but no matter how good the service is, you're going to have to provide most of the quality content on your own.

After you have a good amount of content, promote your forum. Use Adwords. Use signature links. No matter what, though, the first month will probably be quite tough unless you somehow manage to receive like a 100 members in the first few days. So as you continue to promote, post amongst yourself, to your friends. Keep the forum looking active with new posts.

The beginning of the forum is really difficult until you start getting members without having to promote at all. This usually takes at least a couple of months, IMO. Good luck!

 

To get my forum off the ground. I invested a lot of time. I would browse similar forums and find people that had problems and go out of my way to help them via PM. Essentially, I'd bend over backwards for this person in a personal setting.

This was a very crucial step in getting my forum off the ground.

Another thing. I noticed the same problems and questions coming up in nearly every big forum. I'd go and look for problems and then write very detailed articles on the subject. I'd post on the forum "here's a great article for for this problem" and it seamed to help too.

Brandon

 

I've tried to start 2 forums and they both failed pretty miserably. One was active for like 2 months and the other is still active but keeps getting spammed so I'm thinking about taking it down...

 

Ask your friends to post in the forum and ask them as well to promote the site. Maybe you could send them a nice email with details and info about your site.