I just barely opened my forums for users. Now I am trying to promote the site and get some members. I am left with a few options: Buy posts (don't really want to do this...), buy links and wait, or hold a contest. I was thinking about holding a contest. How do you guys feel this will work as a technique for getting users? If there is a cash reward for the winner do you think users will sign up to join the contest and then ditch the site after a winner has been selected? What are some other methods you have employed to jumpstart your forum activity? Heres the site: http://www.hackingforums.org
Well i say you should give a reward contest a shot either cash or something else. Anyways great nice forum, good luck with it.
I have a forum it is just over 1 month old and it is moving on slowly i have targeted advertising to webmaster related site and held 1 posting competition. Holding the competition i think was a bad idea i ended up deleting 60% of posts as they were just spam and basic flooding to win the contest.
Thanks Well I wasn't planning on doing a posting contest. I would prefer to get 10 knowledable members, than 1,000 useless posts. Seeing as it's a programming/computer security site I was thinking of holding a programming contest. Say "The Most Creative Program" or something. To join, you have to register and post your source code or something. This way people will join, and begin to partake in the contest. At the end, the members will vote... What do you think?
offering cash prizes will increase your member base, be careful as you will get alot of crap posted. or one line posts. if possible have it calculated by characters or something. this way members post longer replies. also remove your genearl area if you have one, this will get flooded hope it helps you
ssnet, thanks for your reply but I don't think I am going to offer a posting contest. I think it will be an actual contest where you complete a task and the one who does it the best will win. How do these types of contests fair?
Offering a contest that will only reward higher voted posts is a good way to go as it rewards unique and informative content i would try it see how it goes.
bringing up a forum is very hard today. It used to be fairly easy when DP started out and there was much less competition. Now there are millions of empty forums practically mirroring the other million. I would say your forum is too broad, you cannot survive it without concentrating on your niche, there are so many forums with the similar categories to your forum with allot more content and member base, they would never join. Right now I would recommend several things; 1) Narrow down your topic, like security only maybe? 2) You have too many categories, that will take ages to fill up. Remove some of the categories so forum looks shorter. And more specific. Your too general again. 3) Register yourself and start posting, register 4 members and play a discussion. 4) This will increase your forum activity 5) Hire some forum posters if you cannot do it yourself 6) Use RSS feed to populate some parts of the forum. 7) Tell your friends who are interested in this topic and ask them to participate 8) Good luck.
Well I thought about narrowing down my topics to more general terms. The only problem is, I don't want to focus primarily on security as other things also encompass 'hacking' such as programming, and mods. Any suggestions? Maybe combine a few forums?
Well as of now I don't have a webmasters area. I have PHP under the programming section... what if I combine that section to like "Compiled Languages" and "Interpreted Languages" and then combine a few more to cut the forum's length down by about half?
yes that would be a good step... also check out this site: http://www.forumuniversity.com/campus/index.php there are some usefull tips.
We too have opened a new forum at http://forums.affiliatebot.com I am sure we can pick up some good hints from each other through this thread of yours.