How did you First Drive Traffic to your Forum?

How did you First Drive Traffic to your Forum? Did you do Adwords? What other Marketing methods did you use? Did you Optimize the Forum with Custom Code,VBSEO ?


Just looking to see What worked for you when you started your Forum(s)

Thank you for helping me

-C

 

I advertised as much as I could.

 

related forum posts.

 

i kept on posting in my forum.
After some time, google started sending traffic.
It took a year to get decent traffic though.

 

Thank you all for your feedback.... i look forward to more of you sharing.

-C

 

I was a member of about 25 forums...so out of 25 about 19 let me put a link in my signature. So I posted on each one of those, the larger ones more often and from there, post good content that people will rather visit your forum for and the rest is history.

Be patient, it will not happen overnight...

 

I used myspace and got 600 targeted and active members in a month..

 

Thats called SPAM and most people dont like that.

 

Writing great content, leveraging my related blog for backlinks, and twitter.

 

How the hell is that spam? What are you talking about?

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The key is to invest your time and energy in creating content first. Post threads, create polls, and intrigue visitors. Too many people spend too much time starting out by attracting traffic. Traffic and visitors are nice, but not if there's nothing on your forum for them to see or do. They'll be bouncing out faster than they came in.

 

I was responding to someone who said they send messages on myspace...thats SPAM to me!

 

They never said they sent messages on MySpace. They said they used MySpace. Using doesn't translate to "sending messages."

 

I started my forum with posting constantly.very little advertisement on one site that had 30.000 alexa rank(short time ).gradually I received visitors from google. at now I have 10 k daily.I started april 2004.it is not english.

I have only 92 backlinks.

Direct address / Bookmarks :3.4%
Links from an Internet Search Engine :4.1%
Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines) :92.3 %

 

I use forum signatures, word of mouth, and I post my links on other forums where allowed.

 

I spread word out to friends, advertised on AA, gave staff positions to some good friends also who i could trust.

 

Most of the time, I just visited other forums wearing a link to my forum in my signature.

 

I spread the word about my forum first. ( promoting it in some forum signatures, blog commenting, ect... )

After that, I added some content that most people would find interesting.

Although am not an expert at SEO, I used my knowledge to seo my forum, and that gave me a few unique visitors,

Then, I submitted my url to link directories and social bookmarking websites.

 

Videos then after 9 months i started building backslinks....

 

Thanks for the information. Quite interesting as I am also thinking about starting a forum.

 

i have learned from the feed back of your thread that how to get traffic from the facebook....
i learned that when you get a lot of back links from the forum and then google automatically increase the page rank and the site get traffic