Hi, I just set up what I believe is the only English all Air Car message board. Maybe the only Air Car board in any language. But I've never owned an active message board. Does any one who has have any tips for getting people to join and start posting? If you own a busy forum now, how did you get people to post to an empty forum and stick around when there is no one there? Thank you.
First, you should get serious about building a community. This means getting a real domain name, using quality software and a real hosting package. Right now you are using a free hosting package and phpbb - this is going to seriously limit the growth and flexibility of your site and community later on. At the very least get you a domain name. The theme you are using for your site is very bland. There is more to building a community then just setting up a quick forum and hoping people join. When you get serious about building a real forum, then I will post plenty of information for you. But you have to be serious, or else I will just be wasting my time. You want to know my forum stats? - Right now, one of my sites is getting well over 1,100,000 page views a month and over 1,000 post a day. If I could do it, you can do it.
Are the posters here just stupid, or do they not read threads before posting the same old shit? It's the same answers as in the other 3,352 threads on this question, Gomer.
What's an air car? What does an air car look like? Does it really look like that toy car in the CGI pic? Why would I want buy one? Has the everyday guy seen one before? The average Joe has no idea what an air car is and your forum doesn't offer incentives for me to read into it. IMO, do some articles to compel people about the topic of air cars, and get the word out on article directories. Article marketing would be a key component of marketing for you in this niche.
I opened my first site in March of 2006 with some free forum software. The software was very limited on what it could do and I was not getting that many hits. So in March of 2007 I closed the site, bought a license for Vbulletin and reopened the site in April. The reopening was a complete fresh start with zero post. A lot of the members from the old site came back, so they helped kick start everything. In may I started posting videos on youtube as a marketing scheme. Instead of writing articles I did video articles. The videos were then embedded into my site. There were a lot of threads that were started with nothing more then a short description and the embedded video. My members have started making their own videos and posting them in the forum. Videos have gotten so popular, they have their own section. sometimes the videos become a challenge. I post something, then another member thinks they can do it better and will post another video on how to do the same thing, just a little different. After awhile we got a forum section filled with video bloggers. Date----------Number of post April 2007 ----- 1728 May 2007 -----1626<---- This is when I started posting videos on youtube June 2007 ----- 1447 July 2007 -----3412 August 2007 ----- 4775 Sept. 2007 -----4451 October 2007 ----- 6741 Nov. 2007 ----- 8461 Dec. 2007 ----- 9678 January 2008 ----- 15026 February 2008 ----- 15542 March 2008 ----- 21930 April 2008 ----- 23487 May 2008 ----- 30000 <---- Exactly 30,000 post last month. June 2008 ----- 10006 <---- This month I should get around 40,000 - 50,000 post. So far this month (june) I have only had one day that had less then 1,000 post to my forum. When you open a new forum, depending on the nitch and your marketing scheme, expect about 8 - 10 months for things to really take off. If you are going to install one modification on your forum, let it be video embedding software. If your forum software does not support the embedding of videos, it time to find something that can. This was one of the reasons why I moved to Vbulletin. The first forum software I used could not embed videos.
Very impressive. Videos, and loyal posters seem to be the key of your success. Hope you have more success.