Hi All, I am trying to grow and expand my forum. So far i have done the following: Submitted to about 100 directories Paid for a small amount of advertising Started a Facebook group Told all friends and family I post new info/posts etc every day I have also began to submit typed articles and yahoo answers. What else is there i can do? I dont really want to pay for posters, because in my experience they are bad quality and dont stick around anyway so they never answer any questions members might have of them. Any suggestions as to how i can further grow my travel forum? Preferabbly free or low cost options, as i do not have an advertising budget as yet.
Those are all good ways to get your site's name out there. Forums are difficult to get started so in addition to what you've done I would also, post in other travel forums, comment on travel related blogs and start a travel blog of your own. You could also write some travel articles and submit them to article directories and submit your site to social bookmarking websites. Good Luck
write an article about 300-500 words in you forum and give it a interesting title, then use socialmarker.com to post that article on about 50 sites, yea i know it takes time but i did mine in about 30mins and its free and it definetly brings in traffic. I did this with my proxy website which i made yesterday and i got 248 unique visitors today. I consider that to be high becuase i am a new webmaster and i am still a baby in the online money making market so i am not much of a experience person. But anyway go to socialmarker.com and if you have firefox get there add on it makes it easier. vijay420
Post some helpful tips in other travel forums like how to get cheap flights to Perth, insider tips to travel Sydney under $100 etc.... Show people simple step-by-step how you did it. Place a sig file to send traffic to your own forum. Some forums don't allow you to send traffic to a competition forum, then send traffic to a squeeze page in return for a free report. In your free report, direct traffic to your own forum. If you're knowledgeable and can start interesting threads, you should be able to get traffic soon. Remember, these are warm list from forum members. Not like cool list from PPC traffic. Warm list is more likely to join your forum as they've known you. Hope this helps
The best way is to do your SEo because it would give the best traffic because they are interested on what your site is all about.