if you have a main site with news, and a forum linking to that main site you could create a section in the forum for users to post items they would like to have on the front page. that should give more interactivity.
Here's the link, by the way. http://www.adminfusion.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=84 Just like any other post exchange system, PF has pros and cons, but worth taking a look.
Right now I'm playing with MyBB. I haven't been using it long enough to know if I really like it yet. I was going to go with buying a VB license until someone recommended I try them out first, so I'm just giving it a fair shot. Anyone else use it and have any feedback on it or other forum platforms? Jenn
I have a site that is similar to a forum. It's a polling site where you can create polls for everyone to vote on. Members can also post comments. I started it's first month (July) with a small add campaign, and got 50 new members. Many of them were coming back often until the add campaign ended. Many of the visitors I received had not joined, but at leasted voted making it more interesting for the members. I have a feeling I will have to do a few add campaigns to get enough members to support themselves with new polls, and votes for eachother. I totally do not like the idea of making fake user id's or votes. I understand the need to make it look busy, but that just seems kind of dumb. Create a fake member, create a fake poll, create fake votes, total time 5 minutes. Call friend, and have him/her create it for you...5 minutes, and they might be a fan.
I kind of agree, but pragmatically speaking, I think it's important to create a couple of user accounts for yourself, post and build some content.
i would say 80% of forum success depends on the topic. A big mistake many people make is to start a forum for a website that doesn't need one. For example, forums where people can talk about anything will be harder to promote than forums covering a real niche topic (for example money making forums, affiliate forums, etc) or product forums where members ask support, share mods, etc. It all depends on your site topic Didier
Well if there is one thing I have learnt having recently started a forum on a topic that I have relatively no experience with it is you need need to know your topic - you need to be able to interact with members and guest. I'm an admin of a forum that I know nothing about, that was a big mistake... I also own a forum that is relative successful, but I knew this niche well and marketed it well and with time (and time is a big factor with forums) it grew. Some of the biggest improvements I made were creating a custom introduction that really make it easy for guests to register as well as listing a number of reason why they should register - doing this improved registrations 100%. Secondly I often found that when promoting a competition registrations also improve by up to 50-100% so running competitions are a great way to get more registrations. But what is essential for any forum is a good knowledge base and users that know what they are talking about combined with lots of traffic... forums are often a numbers game the more traffic you get the more registrations you get (help along by good converting method like the intro paragraph and competitions). With more registrations you get more members which post more which creates more content which means more pages indexed in search engines which means more visitors which leads to more members... but to do this you need to have a well SEOed forum and you need you forums to be search engine friendly, which means as someone said removing session ids so bots can crawl your forums. Some forum software out there are well known to be quality products, vBulletin and IPB being the main two - but they will cost you a pretty penny or two but in hindsight a SE friendly forums can be the difference in hundreds of visitors a day which over a year pays itself off ten fold. Well those are some things you can do on your forums to help out... but I guess what you do off your forums is what really matters, and it's all about good quality traffic and unless you have a similar topic website to feed your forums your are more than likely going to have to buy you significant none search engine traffic, but it takes money to make money and forums really aren't things that can be done in halves - if they aren't active people won't join it is that simple... so if you are going to start a forums... go all or nothing at it.