If you check my sig, there's a site called Global warming discussions(globalicwarming). It's mainly a forum with some second hand content and it's inactive. All the users there and all posts(except two) was created by me. I tried to market it by putting a link on my signature in a science board but it doesn't seems to result in many visitors. And I'm pretty lazy when it comes to writing articles. So I think I want to spend some money on it., I get 40$ from my social security each day and I barely use 10$ of those each day(living at home). So I can have a budget at maximum 30$/day. What should I do if I want to get it active for as less money aspossible and ASAP without much timewasting?
writing and posting articles to various sites would do you well. Might want to look into creating some press releases also. There are many people, even on this board that, that will produce and publish great content for you if you are not interested in doing to. Good luck
First, get rid of the popups. Second, buy vBulletin and install. Third, get a professional design. Fourth, recruit people to post. When, and only when, you have those things done, including having at least a small group of people interested in the topic who visit and post daily on your forum, should you worry about promoting the site further.
Yeah, to be honest-- You are going to need a better design. Your main page is all standard flat html. I noticed your forums also just use the default skin. Spend some time making it look pretty good. You can pay for this if you want, but you might want to spend your spare time working on it. Then if you see it coming together you can start spending on it. And yes, get rid of the popups!
Whats wrong with PHPBB? It's the most used board on the internet and it's open source. I did a mod_rewrite so the search engines must love it
I agree a new design to start. Find someone who makes templates for your bulletin software and I am sure you can get them to modify one of their current templates at a reasonable rate. At the very least get a good header and footer file. (Third vote here for Vbulletin) You need to find people interested in the topic to help you get the forum started. Once you have a few good threads going use Adwords or similar products to promote your forum. Even if you go for the min. bids with PPC it will help to get visitors and great for branding. I would also make fliers and have someone post them around the college campuses in your area. Perhaps you could get a science professor to mention it in class and suggest it to students. Also just my opinion but until your forum is active with loyal users I would get rid of the Adsense. At the very least put the Adsense near the bottom of the site not to distract your new visitors. Remember getting visitors there is only part of the battle. You need to keep them there and get them to return. Best of luck with your endeavor!
I tried that once.. spent 50 bucks and got 500 vistors.. no new members, no new posts. I can't do that, closest campus is like 100 miles away, I live very far from civilization.
Sorry but you can't be serious if you say that I should ditch PHPBB for VBulletin. I already have a big archive of posts that I wont SEs to index and I have seen many succesfull PHPBB boards. I did some improvements however.. removed the popups, switched location of adsense and recently added a dynamic sitemap.
Work on a good design and even better content and you will not go wrong. Sometimes hard work is the best marketing available Good luck
you must worked on site content make it unique. then do social bookmarking or article submission for your site. Thank you.