Look on vg.org for somethign caled floras stats padder. You can padd your stats by anything you want. Want to have 100 registers users and 10000 posts? Easy
With my older sites I used to post news, reviews, and other articles inside the forum so that when a user was done reading they would be more likely to sign up and post something. I also hate to say it, but being controversial is the easiest way to do it. Have a site about a game? Say something to provoke a response in users. I think slashdot.org posts some dumb news just to do this. Be careful not to make it look like flamebait though, just something that will provoke a conversation. I found it takes a while to get a forum going, and I just started up a new forum a few weeks ago. Takes maybe 3 months with little work to get them going, only a few weeks if you talk to yourself and 14 other personalities! Chris
If you do decide to go down the route of posting under multiple id's yourself, or getting a troupe of friends to help you out, make a list of popular questions/topics that are often asked on similar forums to yours and make your posts around those topics. If you make the initial topics and threads interesting, informative, and based on FAQ's for your niche, you'll have a good chance of converting passing traffic into members (and if you've done your homework and the forum is SEO friendly, you'll have a good chance of catching natural SE traffic for popular words/phrases in your niche).
Ive seen some forums do that but done realy badly. Actually make sure you wait proper intervals. Its silly onlky have 100 posts under 20 alias' all on the same day, or for that matter hour.
I'm so lazy to promote my forum. I think I will just sit and wait for a while. I got ranked real high at Google, so I am expecting a good result soon.
offer people on here something like a website script or other files if they go on and make 10 posts or something.
If you are going to reply to your own posts with a different user id it is also very important to make the writing styles all be different. Two different people don't write the same and use the same words.
Tons of great feedback. Thanks. To Start - I'm going to: 1) Going to give a prize away (hopefully donated) 2) Do some real cheap adwords advertising 3) Promote it back to this crew when it launches.. It should be a popular topic by then. Cheers,
as an admin you should open a lot of topics and reply to the posts made by ur users, it will get them to know u and the forum and come back, i have about 180 or so members now but not really all active
Give a warm welcome to every new comer. It works very effective. When it's your first time in a forum site, it is normal to feel like an outsider.
old advice but I think it's still useful - from the owner of a very popular message board http://www.urban75.org/tech/bulletin_board.html