Hi, I need help. I have a forum running. I am getting lots of traffic but no one signs-up and recently I had a drop in traffic. Can anyone help me to get traffic eaily and people who sign-up and post. Thx..
If you are getting a lot of guests, the you should make the best forums private, so if someone wants to see them they have to sign up. Also holding a contest is always good.
You should make tons of threads yourself that provide useful information, you should offer prizes for a certain amount of posts. You could also hire one of those companies that sends people to post in your forum, though I don't know how well that works. You could give away a free gift to get email signups and then you could remind people about the forum in your newsletters. You could also add the forum link to your sig and post in other forums.
Try to find some active members in other forum and invite them to be moderators. This will help to motivate them to promote your forum.
When you first start out, it is helpful to hire some forum posters to start the ball rolling so that when people see that it is an active forum, they will join in. People are natural skeptics especially with something so new.
http://mugshot.org is linux official social networking site, you may wish to join there, that can help you to get few members, also target small community of linux students/enthusiastic groups that can help you to get members especially if your forum has something useful for them.
Yap, people don't really like to go empty forums. You can also try to post a few stuff, let you visitor feel your forum is alive and kicking!
Those traffic could be spam bot visiting your forum to spam it, I own 2 groups of software professionals (4500 members) you can send a message about your fourm once for $4. PM me if interested.
Can I see your forum URL? Ask your self what your Linux forum is providing that this Linux forum is not providing http://www.linuxquestions.org/ ? I don't think you will get good response from you. So, conclusion is choose niche that is different from others and in which you can provide unique and regular quality content. Above no offense, not discouraging you, but just my 1 cent based on experience Good Luck. -topbuyer
There are other ways also to say thanks Anyhow, what I feel is if you have lots of money to invest regularly, then you should proceed further by advertising your forum. Otherwise, chose something other niche like Linux blog instead of forum etc.. Good Luck. -topbuyer
I think if you limit something, you'll get more sign ups . for instance the unsubscribed visitors just can read the first post of thread or some thing like that ;-) Just try new things and compare the result with other one. an other point you should consider is that there are lots of free and available article on internet about linux thus you must provide something new and interesting for visitors
1) Hire forum posters. You need quality content regularly. 2) Provide incentives to encourage people to post. These can be in the form of reward schemes and competitions. 3) Post on other Linux related forums. Contribute quality content and people will be interested in the site that you're promoting. - Matt
Before you promote it, I suggest getting rid of most of those categories. The more empty categories, the more emptier your forum looks. If you don't want to get rid of them, make some of them subforums. Also you need to fill your forum with more useful content. You can either do it yourself or hire some people to do it. You can find more suggestions at http://drknownothing.com/?p=12