Almost all of the information on dp is concerned about promoting static sites, mostly article sites. You know, put some articles together, register at some directories, maybe start an adwords campaign, and you slowly start having some real nice traffic. But what about community sites, or on a more general term, sites which rely on the crowd? I mean, if there is no active discussions, no one joins. If no one joins, there is no community... How can i get past this point to where community builds itself? I know, there are a lot of forum promoting services, which basically posts messages as fake users. But i have a very unique community site (not a forum, not a friend network site), how can i make people join?
The easiest way to jump start your community is by holding promotions or paying people to post. On forums where they have F$ for posts you can pay people 25 F$ for signing up and posting 5 times. This will generally get your member base up and running at the same time help populate your forums. Another way to make your forum look fuller is by adding a bot or two which will automatically post several articles through RSS per day or run a game bot.
Content and active members are the keys to get a community forum going, if there are no new posts and no active dicussions, the visitors to your forum won't even bother to register. So you yourself should be active in your forum. Ask your friends and family to join and make posts in the form of questions and get the conversations going. You can also start posting and/or referral contests. Also, as you get new members, try sending out regular newsletters to remind your members about visiting your forum
You need them to interact and give them a way/reason to do the same. Depends on your subject matter but adding in user submitted images/ratings/competitions/provoking articles designed to get a reaction can generate enough interest for your user to get involved whether that is just uplaoding an image, registering or leaving comments.
This is a topic that I'm interested in as well. I've had my community-based site up for a month now, and I'm having a really hard time getting over that hump in terms of growing the community to the point that it attracts new users on its own. I've asked my friends and family to help out, but they're not interacting consistently enough to make too big of a difference. Plus, aside from altruism, they don't have any real incentive to help me out. I don't really think the whole "post buying" thing would help in my case, but that seems to be the biggest suggestion I see in these types of threads.
There is also this forum topic which deals with the same or similar issue... It's actually about "How to promote a site on a local area(like a US state or city)" but some of the ideas might help? http:// forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=1332910#post1332910 I had to put a space between the http:// and the URL itself due to not being able to post live links just yet.
One of my old car sites sponsored an event at a local drag strip every saturday night. We got a large local radio station to give us some plugs a few days a week. It was great promotion. if you can, get something like that going for you.
Hi, My suggestion is instead of hiring a forum posting company to post on your site - who may not have people knowledgeable in your subject, hire a few ghostwriters to post on your forum for you. I experimented with this recently and it worked like a charm with a health forum that I was trying to get started. I hired a few ghostwriters from the site in my signature, of course . What you do is this: say your forum is about sports, go to the ghostwriting site in my signature, post a project asking for writers who are experts in writing about sports. Choose the best writers for the job and then hire several of them to post to your site for a month. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than hiring a writer to write full fledge articles for you and what you end up with is a forum that is filling up with useful and beneficial posts by people who are well versed in the subject. Try and see for yourself. Regards, Sunshine
Sounds very good idea to me. Sponsering events related to the forum topic will definately be a good idea.
Hopefully by the time the paid posting has finished the extra activity will have encouraged other users to have signed up.