Hi there. I am just wondering how I can kick off a new webmaster forum. Are there any special techniques I should pull to bring members in to post and such? I am trying to build up my webmaster forum because I dished out a LOT of money (to me at least) for the domain, vBulletin license, custom forum skin, and coding. Replies and suggestions appreciated. Thanks!
Try to add as many topic you can to it, no one likes to come to a dead forum. Once there is enough topics, people will come back to it to read more, and then people will start to post. Good luck with it
Here's what I would do: Start a webmaster-based website with a ton of topics, build up a loyal user base, and when you have enough repeat visitors, create a forum for them and bam -- instant successful forum. But how to measure your loyal user base? Create polls every now and then and see how many "votes" you get. Only your loyal users will vote anyway, as fly-by-night visitors don't waste their time usually. What do you think? Good idea?
I'd try to find subjects which are up and coming like Ajax and inovative areas of web design. There are just so many forums about web design the way it is today. Look towards the future and get in early.
In my opinion there are already a ton of webmaster forums out there. As they said though more activity is key. Just like the reason I joined DP. I happened to end up here ( I wasn't searching for a forum or anything ) and i noticed a wealth of information and tons of activity. Even my very favoritest forum yaXay I am starting to visit less often just because there are not as many new topics and when I post a topic it takes a while for a response. They are still a great forum if any of oyu are interested yaXay.com .
Hm, i would probably touhly consider starting your forum in your place while there is an established competetion at http://www.webmaster-talk.com (just your address without the trailing "s") - of do you want to hijack their traffic???
I would (and did) follow jackburton2006's advice. Get the user base first. That route is infinitely easier.
A good idea will be to offer some tools or services on your website. Then discuss them on your forums. Also, start threads and forums on new and other related topics and if something good is being discussed on your forums, you can post a link on other webmaster forums in related topics and posts, as a resource to the users.
You've got a very nice looking forum there. The problem is that webmaster forums are a dime a dozen these days, and the topics aren't going to change much between them. I'm pretty much exclusively on DP these days, mainly reading, and I used to visit Sitepoint. I migrated to here because it seemed that more was going on, and more importantly I could learn more here. I come to webmaster forums to learn, to get help on areas I don't specialise in, and to help others as I have been helped to reach the level I'm at. If you want to attract regular members to your site, you first need to attract people they can learn from.
Well I am trying to boost the activity up and create as many interesting topics and posts that I can think of right now. I am very grateful to have the help of Mr. Crow, who is also a user registered here. kozuch82, I am actually trying to directly compete with them, yes. This domain allows me to pull in some of their typos sometimes so that's a boost of traffic that is definately nice. Shawn, I don't think articles or any thing of that sort will be relavent for this type of website because really its just supposed to be a forum. But I am trying to post as many interesting threads in the place of articles to build interest. Thanks for the replies and suggestions. Please, keep them coming!
A webmaster forum is probably the hardest site/forum to build up. Some suggestions (I firmly believe in these even though I don't follow them myself. You'll just have to trust me on this! ) Start with just a few forums - 4 or less. Focus on niche topics instead of targeting all webmasters in general. You can always expand later. Create software or service and build the forum around it. Even better if the software or service is free. Show committment to your forum. Post useful stuff. Keep the forum running nice and fast! Just an FYI, webmaster forums generally won't make you much money especially if you're banking on adsense or other CPC, unless you make it among the top webmaster forums with lots of activity like DP and then you can hope to sell CPM campaigns. Case in point, my webmaster forum has made a total of less than $10.00 since launch in December 2005.
Webmaster forums? This is well established niche and giants are to compete.Its not easy to leak visitors from webmasterworld,sitepoint and dp.Because they have dedicated and loyal users but if you would rank high in serp there is chance to get some new faces.But for this you have to build some traffic and add contents.If you want to do it all in natural way then only way is what jackburton suggested and add uniqueness and another way is to contract paid posters for at least six months.Then you may see good results.
I have thought of a unique idea to hopefully get visitors interested in the site. I feel that this website should just be focused as a webmaster forum, and not as an article website because of the domain. Would having a webmaster site with a different domain and with articles help if I just claimed Webmasters Talk to be its forum? Thanks for the suggestions! They're valued!
If I built a webmaster-related content website on a different domain, could I claim Webmasters Talk to be its forum and would it still be as effective? Thank you.
What is your website traffic? If you have a decent traffic, like 500 uniques per day, you can easily start a forum.
I'm currently building 18 small niche sites to get traffic from the SE's, each site will earn from adsense as well as having links to my niche forum. So i'll be earning twice! Adsense earnings and extra traffic for my forum. So yes, i'd say that what your suggesting is as if not more effective. Oh and fancy swapping links with www.quickwhois.co.uk? I'll give you a site wide link in my main menu (Probably in the place of current SEO forum link.) Hope this helps Ash