My last website did fairly well, but I suppose I was so used to it and I was in that niche for so long, it was "easier" for me to market. I'm a musician but gah I'm having a hard time coming up with ideas to promote this forum. Ideas are welcome!
Well the thing about that is..Usually those forum members on related forums are pretty loyal to that community. Why would they want to make the switch to my forum when there's a huge forum where they been a member of for a long time? What I'm saying is, I'm going to need to think of many other ways to promote rather than depending on something that's so not for sure. I'm willing to spend some $
There could be many reasons somebody from a popular forum would join you. I have just started a small forum; I have got most of my members from DP and other big forums. Yes you have to find more ways for marketing. Contest is a good idea. I had good results with that. You said you have other successful sites. You can use them for marketing.
Well I HAD other more successful sites, but the niches were totally different and I've sold them. This is my only project I'm kicking off at the moment.
Another option, though not free, is Facebook PPC. They let you target prospects by interests, so your ad would only show to those users who are interested in the specific music genre's your forum discusses. Just a thought!
Have you tried just posting in music forums with a sig. There are some REALLY popular music forums so I would imagine you could get a knock-on effect and some members trying your place out...
Perhaps starting a music blog and promoting the forum through that. You might find a blog easier to promote initially through RSS feeds, and places like Technorati. Not to mention other music blogs (via commenting). For that matter, you may be able to promote you forum itself through blog comments. You want to be sure that you're contributing to the conversation though, and not just spamming their comments. Simply linking your name is a good idea rather than posting the link in the comment itself.
A good way to go is to submit your site to multiple social bookmarking sites adn tons of directories. This is a sure shot way of getting more traffic. Visit the URL below. webcosmoforums.com/showthread.php?t=1278
Submit your forum to relevant topics via blogs and link building sites that are similar to your forum. advertise to high pagerank, low alexa traffic, high inbound link count, and popular blog buzz to see the best reaction. use RTSSE (real-time statistical search engine) technology for best results
I'm having a similar problem...in fact started a thread on it already, but some of my ideas are to offer a jumpstart on rank for the first # of members, mod status for some # of posts. One I just thought of was maybe you could offer link love for people who blog about music and related items...let 'em know that you're willing to allow them to create backlinks as long as they post relevant material.