Last week I finally finished putting together a new version of my student site (Rogue Students) that I've been working on for some time. It's already got quite a lot of posts on the forum given that it's not been online for very long, but they're mostly from the same three people. I'm trying to expand the site so that there's more active members posting rather than just having a few members typing away all day and churning out 100+ posts/week, but I'm not sure how to go about promoting the site. I've already submitted the front page to Google (which is crawling it at the moment according to my logs) and some of the smaller search engines, plus I've sent it into dmoz (doubt it will ever get in there though based on their complete lack of response to most sites I've submitted), but I'm not sure where to go from here. I don't really have much money (I'm a student too, and it was hard enough finding the $85 for the vBulletin license!) so I can't go and buy a load of Adwords or anything like that. The more active members have sent out emails to their friends but have either not got a response or those people have signed up and then not posted anything. Any ideas on how I can get more people involved with the site? I'm not too bothered about fiddling about with all sorts of optimisations to make it rank higher in Google (although obviously that would be nice), I'm more interested in creating a solid base of regular members who will keep things fresh in order to attract larger numbers of casual viewers who might visit the forums but not post anything. Thanks in advance.
Hmm, not sure if a post exchange would work because I don't really find any of the forums there interesting enough to post in, and they don't seem to be along similar lines to mine (most of them seem to be either very obscure or about SEO). I'll keep it in mind though, thanks for the suggestion.
You could probably run some relatively cheap print ads in student publications from different colleges? Something to check out.... Good luck.