You guys have all given me some great suggestions. At 500 bucks for a liscence I can't afford VBulletin. I will stick with PHPBB for now.
Not $500 --- you can lease the software for $85 a year or buy it outright for $160. Where did you get $500 from?
I can recommend Michael Green's "How to start a forum", I think he's quite successful with his own forum which has quite a nice Alexa rating
Hello Web Gazelle, Just wanted to make a couple quick comments regarding gettig your forum going. 1) As someone else mentioned, consolidate your forums until the demand is there for them. Empty forums will "scare" potential members away. 2) You need to be dilligent about posting at this stage of the game with your forum. No one will build it for you, you need to post there yourself multiple times a day, every day, until it picks up some momentum. 3) Find forums with similiar themes that allow signature links. For example, your posts/links in a general pets forum is much more likely to attract potential members than a post/signature in an unrelated forum will. 4) If you have small budget, try Adwords. I would suggest completing steps & 2 prior to spending money to promote your forum. 5) Try and develop a USP (unique selling point). Put yourself in you visitors shoes...why would/should they join your forum instead of a larger more established forum on the same topic? After you've convinced them to join, your USP should also be one of the reasons they keep coming back. 6) Solicit feedback. Some people like being part of "something new" and will go out of their way to help if you ask the right questions. 7) Start a lot of threads that encouarge people to post - ask questions, even if you already know some of the answers. 8) Contests...be creative here. 9) Step outside of the Internet and take a look at the pet stores in your local community. Will they allow you to post a flyer or other form of ad in their store? Could you offer them advertising on your forum in exchange for advertising in their store? I helped someone with a dog related site/forum last year. They were able to get 4 pet stores in their area to include their site's url on the bottom of their receipts in exchange for a banner at the site. Good luck, let us know how your community progesses!
My forum is doing well and it's all because of the people involved with it. A good core group of dedicated individuals will work wonders
Great suggestions. I have looked into several of them and I aggree I need to be as active as possible in it even if I am talking to myself.
For the first month I really had to work hard to get my forum going. I posted multiple times a day and constantly started new threads. A month or so later, I developed a dozen or so dedicated visitors, and now I barely have to create new threads. It does take time, but I also spent some money getting people there by doing contests and requiring people who want to enter the contest to register first. What I did was basically told them that the only way to enter was to register and then post a reply (any reply) in the contest thread. Once they've registered, they're much more likely to post in other threads. Even those who don't engage, usually returns to lurk on a daily basis.
That's the "non branded/private label" version, ie, it won't mention vBulletin in the footer. A normal owned license is $160.
You can also sign up for a Post Exchange when you are first starting out. As Jack said, after a while if you are putting the time in, it will very slowly start to grow. Once it goes empty for a few days in a row, its hard to recover. People only like busy forums.
I would not recommend getting a forum raid. I went to theadminzone to check it out. A forum raid is simply requesting to have your forum raid by a group of people to make posts on your forum. Those that have requested a forum raid have complained about alot of spam and porn links being posted in their forum. http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6223