How to make a productive forum?

I am thinking to start a forum but learning things at the moment.

I know that a forum can be good only with good members who make good posts,help each others and are honest.

What are more things that are required to make a forum grow?

Thanks!

 

You need to make your forum look busy, have content spread across. When you are starting a forum it's a good idea to have as little categories and forums as you can so that the categories look full.

Some admins go as far as creating accounts and posting from them, but that's evil deception.

 

In the beginning,Should we make fake accounts and post?

 

I never did that with my forum, but sometimes it does help

 

It seems it can be done in the beginning to get members.

 

yeah, promote your forum like hell though, be sure to have a reason why people should leave another forum to come to yours e.g modification, style etc.

 

Yes.I think there should be something special in the forum for the members.

 

I'm being a bit sneaky here, but look my forum at theflickzone and see what we have to offer, in terms of features

 

No you should not.

 

you need to cover all category of ref. forum will make it better forum.

 

A forum contest is always a good idea to jumpstart a community. Ofcourse, after the contest is over, you'll have alot of people that will stop posting, but at least it will seem like your community is more active and maybe some people will stick to the site.

 

I make sure that I'm as active a member of my own message board as I can possibly.

 

Make sure you're active yourself, as that is pretty important. Get some of your friends to join and ask them to be active, that will give other people a good image of your forum.

 

Yes you should - otherwise it'll just sit there empty.

 

sorry, i don't!
there is no difference with pay someone for posting.
i will let my friends know and ask them to support at the beginning.

 

Just finished setting up mine. I wont be setting up fake members as I think its wrong.

Hope to get members by have interesting and useful info on the site

 

all are effective advise but like to add another thing hire people to run the show.

 

I suggest you take a look here for a FULL list of suggested things.

The basics lie in good management, content and marketing. You must market your forum heavily - do link exchanges, advertise etc. Content is king, as always, so make sure you have plenty of quality and unique content on your forum so that people will be attracted to it and will want to visit it fo that unique reason.

 

Agreed, I owned a forum and I made sidebars and etc. And it had alot of content and it became successful !

 

I never made fake accounts on my forum.

All I did was keep posting on it as if it was a blog.

At the same time, I kept working its SEO.

Slowly people started commenting and asking questions....and it took off..

The quality of information on a forum is most important and not the amount of activity.

Be whatever you expect your members to be.

if you are rude, your members will be rude.
if you are unhelpful, your members will be unhelpful.
if you are secretive about "trade secrets", you can expect the same from your members.
if you are lazy and hardly post on your forum, you can expect worse from your members....

newbies are much more easier to get on a new forum.

someone with a lot of experience is unlikely to remain long on a new forum.

thus, you should focus the most on helping out newbies.