What can I do to get more users to my site/forum ? ... It's been up for a while, there is a FB page and a twitter account, I get some hits, but nothing drastic and almost no registered users on the forum :< any ideas?
make multiple accounts and post some topics and talk to yourself..lol. its really hard to kick start a forum though..
What else are you doing to drive traffic? Even a Facebook page and Twitter account won't help if they're not active. I would think that a forum is just like ay other website, at least initially. You have to get people there that want to return...traffic and return traffic. Have you thought about hiring some people to help jumpstart things? Maybe post a job on oDesk and get some people to start some discussions, social bookmark some topics, maybe get a good YouTube video circulating. Good luck!
I think your interest did not attract visitors. Not all people like what you like. And also, your color design made human eye hard to look at your topics. I did have a forum that I created three weeks ago, and the forum got to sign up everyday. The forum members will increase every single day. This is because I put contents that are most people interested in joining. However, I also got many new comers aka spammers join and posting like nobody..until I want surrender...lol....j/k. I need few volunteers moderators
Kick starting a forum really is a difficult task. I have set up only one forum so far and had to invest a loads of time and money to get it going. The best thing you can do is hire a team of posters who will make a content on your forum and will rise a discussions related to your forum thematic. I needed 500 threads and 2000 posts to get some real people sign up to my forum.
Well what some people do is outsource the first posts. If you have some budget, try hiring some cheap workers overseas to create accounts and post just like regular users, the forum will explode overtime.
Well it depends on what you're outsourcing there. Your social bookmarks, YouTube, Twitter, etc. will fall under SMM - Social Media Marketing. For building your forum with topic generation and discussion, I would probably choose either Other - Sales & Marketing or Other - Administrative Support. For either of those, you should be able to find capable contractors to help you build your forum.
Thanks for the help everyone! I found someone on this site up for the challenge and knowledgeable on the topic!
Getting a forum started is rough. One of my old forums that ended up being quite successful and now has been sold off was kick-started by talking to myself and hiring a few forum posters. Eventually the SEO on the forum was good enough it did great on Google and BAM forum born.
use rss, post links at facebook, try to find any internet users and give them moderators access, and it would be great if you can buy ads for couple of months.