How long for forum success?

Generally speaking, how long does it take for a forum to start taking off and being successful?

My forum has only been live for 5 weeks now so I don't expect anything really yet, but I was hoping for more member registrations and current members to be more active as far as starting threads.

I only have a "few" adsense ads and that's it. How long should one wait to be able to start to see advertising revenue? Would it be based on time or daily uniques and pageviews?

I have an "Advertise with us" link that no one has responded to but I knew that would be the case this early. Later on, is it better to contact potential sponsors or is it better to just let them contact me? Hoping I see enough traffic down the road...lol

 

how long.. I can't really say.. because it depends on your site if you already have regular members right. So it's better promote and promote it now!

 

what is your forum so we can take a look, will be able to help you better if we see it

 

Have you seeded the forum so there is activity? Is there an RSS feed available for content posts? Is it easy to access the forum from your main pages? Have you promoted the forum in your other communication channels (ie. newsletter, blog, etc...)?

 

It is depends, however, if you can get more traffic to your forum that will be more helpful to you. There will be more registrations and more business too. To get more traffic you have to do more OFF SITE SEO....

 

For forums, the more posts, the more people who join and post, so it's an upward spiral in that way.

 

Thanks for the posts guys.

Yes, I have been seeding the forum, matter of fact, I've been seeding it so well I've developed multiple personality disorder. Just how long do I have to keep this up?

Yes, my forum is easily accessible from my portal. I do not have an RSS feed within the forum.

As of late, more registrations are slowly trickling in but the new members are not posting or creating new threads. I do some off-site SEO with twitter, digg and stumbleupon. But I find social network traffic to be the hit and run variety as they do not click on much and have banner blindness.

I realize my forum is just a tad over 5 weeks old, but I am indexed in Google rather nicely with some very good search phrases. So I'm not looking for instant success because that would be unrealistic.

I just wanted to get some opinions as how long it take in general to achieve forum success, I've heard it takes an average of 1 year. Is this correct?

 

Get good, targeted traffic, and a few interested core members. Try to get friends / people you know to get involved and make sure to keep some traffic going into the site.

Seeding it by posting under multiple accounts is kind of useless if you don't have lots of people viewing your forums.

Its hard to get a forum up, but it definately doesn't take a year. All it takes is a lot of focused effort to get some people posting, and then hope you can keep it on an upward trend.

 

If my forum is about 5 weeks since launch, how many uniques per day at this point would you consider "lots of people viewing your forums".?