Help with my Forum

Hi Everyone,

I'm currently trying to promote my forum to try and get new users signed up. Is there a community where you can join and help each others forums out?

I know it's all about creating good content on there but without anyone to read it.... well you know. Suggestions would be appreciated. I'm using a few people to help make it feel more active.

Thanks

 

Some people hire people to post, or the forum admin/mods make posts themselves. They then reply to their own posts. That's to make the forum appear to have life. Today, forums pretty much cover almost everything. If you have a good niche, with a good amount of people that have few alternatives then your forum can do well.

As to a forum that supports forums, you could try the script-maker themselves. You can talk about your forum here, but don't mention the link. If someone asks via PM then you could reply.

 

Create posts for popular topics
You can't expect visitors to create all the posts on your forum, especially when it is first starting. Therefore, it is up to you to create some of the initial interesting, controversial, or otherwise provoking posts that make people want to respond or make a comment on the topic. It is also a good idea to set a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule where you visit the forums and create an interesting post.

 

I've heard of a few people who use Mechanical Turk to generate questions/answers. For a penny each, or less, you can generate quite a lot of threads, then you could reply to them. You might even get a few return users out of it. I do not know how it is done though.

 

You should ignore all of the posts advising you to pay people to post. Lol @ $.01/post. You will turn your forum in to a ghetto graveyard...

Most successful forums launched THESE DAYS are done by either 1.) companies or individuals with strong community influence 2.) a forum added to a website already with a member base and/or consistent traffic.
I have no idea what your forums niche is but you should probably focus on creating a "parent" site for the niche. You can add a blog, articles, videos, resource etc, Once your web site becomes of value and is receiving consistent traffic you can launch or introduce the concept of a forum. You will then see interaction.

Most busy web sites today were not just thrown up with all of their features right off the bat. Would FaceBook ever have a Market Place if they had only 30k people? No. And if they did it would not have been successful. You need to build a community first before you expect the community to interact with one another hehe... Paying people pennies to make irrelevant posts will NEVER launch your forum. It just gives you a slight chubby with no satisfaction...

 

And here @NetStar is speaking from experience. A lifelong experience. LOL.

@scott2342 Abandon the idea of running a forum. It's not going to take off and even if you had a base of already available users they would not necessarily be flocking to your new forum. It is stupid to think that if you have a base of users they are going to keep your forum busy. Don't listen to that type of nonsense. Forums are a dying breed. Even once super large, super effective forums are dying. And those that are still thriving are few and far between.

 

Forum's aren't a "dying breed". The conception that forums are dead is a misconstrued one. General chat forums of various random topics are dead because of social media. However, forums focused on subjects of mutual interest (car model, fatloss, body building, work, hobbies etc.) are NOT dying anytime soon. In fact, most niche forums are FINE. And 90% of the people on here looking to launch a forum want to launch a niche forum. General Forums of general topics are a dying breed.

 

Well that gives me hope, Mine is a niche

 

Since you have a niche, some ideas:
1. Do you have friends or colleagues who share this interest and would be willing to post?
2. Are you promoting your forum in places like Google+, Twitter, Facebook? I can't say you will get a lot of leads, but at this point I see it as the more exposure the better.
3. Do you have places in this niche to talk up your forum? Meetups, networking events, online groups.
4. Maybe consider a podcast or video on the subject with a plug for the forum.

 

Go on other forums related to your topic and put your forum in your signature. Also, if someone asks a question, link them to a relevant post on your forum if it's actually helpful to them.

 

If you want to grow your forum, use a blog to promote it.