Well, me and my friend run this forum. www.chillground.com we have tried all we possibly can to get it active, search engine submission, affiliates etc.. Can anyone help us get it active please? ATM we have a few people coming on and posting, we give the community everything it asks for! We have 416 games in our arcade! What more could they want? We are ion despirate need of help to get our forum active, please help someone with a successfull forum. thanks, seeeecret.
Have you tried social bookmakring sites, e.g. del.icio.is or stumbleupon? You also need to work on building links to your forum, so that appears higher in the search engine results (a la SEO). Cryo.
For example you put the link to your forum into your signature. Then you have created a backlink to your site. And many backlinks make your page more popular, and you will get more visitors. And you will get a higher position in the search engine results.
mmh, what does this del.icio do? ive installed it n verified my email address... i dont understand how this can get me more members :S
If your forum is empty no one is going to start. Either get your friends to start posting, do it yourself under many usernames or scrape together the $65 and get yourself some posts: http://www.inb0x.com/ I've used them and the quality of posts is generally very good.
I just saw that you posted your url so I went to take a look .... is that small link to forums on the left your only navigation to your forums? If you're really stressing the forum point I'd try to make the link more prominent. (when in doubt beat your users over the head with it) I was just about to give up looking for the link when I saw it. Also it seems like you have a decent number of posts and members ... how long has your forum been active? I can't speak from experience (my forums are new too) but I've read that growing a successful forum typically requires patience.
our forum has been open about 3 weeks now ^_^ But out of all our members if you look on the members online today their the only ones active :S most of the time hardly anyone is on!
You might want to check out ico-content http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=228744&highlight=ico-content. It is a program that helps populate your forum with posts. No one wants to join a dead forum.
If it's 3 weeks, your best advice is probably "keep at it" and don't expect results so quickly. Put yourself in the mindset that it'll probably be more like 3 months (or more) before you'll feel like there is some real growth ... but do keep at it the whole time. Continue to add content, work on getting indexed, build incoming links, etc.