I have installed forum software. People visit my website. I offer free e-books, so they also register to get free stuff. But I also have discussion forum that is empty. No one asks or discusses anything. How to start running discussion forum and develop a community that itself creates a momentum.
Hi, as you are an administrator of your forum ,you have to participate as much as possible to all discussions . i.e starting new and informative threads replies to old ones,especially try to reply to every thread in the introduction threads. Your forum should be easy to use. at the end online marketing and SEO is the only key for success .
Process is pretty simple to run a discussion forum. at very first , you must develop the forum and need drive it by you.In order to develop the community here , be responsive with every discussion and keep the live members. Also need to collect new members. Also you must do SEO with your forum and try to put the link every where.
As previously said, you need to have threads already in place that will attract people's attention making them a lot more likely to post. At first you want to focus on simply filling up a few different forum categories then the rest should follow. You should also remember that you will need to make a lot of posts at the start of your forums lifespan as you will be responsible for most of the flow of discussion etc. If you want your forum to pick up quickly then i'd suggest hiring a forum poster or looking around to see whats avaliable. If you're interested in a forum poster or a lot of different forum posters then be sure to PM me.
A lot of people don't want to be the one's that start the first thread. I suggest you start the thread yourself and then people will participate. Another pointer is that since you forum is new, try keeping the sections to a minimal. i.e don't have many section. maybe 2 at most for now
I have started quite a few forums in the past. The best advice I can provide is make the content and theme of the forum as unique as possible. From this you will find that members will then slowly stream in and start creating topics as they have not had the chance to on other forums.
To get the forum started, I recommend spending some money on adwords, and engage the users that come in. Once the discussions start it will be easier. Make the forum as vertical as possible - it is not easy to compete with an existing forums.
In running a forum, you should make it a habit to create content daily to your discussion forum threads. Second, find a content sharing service that'll autoshare your content to social networks without you manually posting links everytime you post a new discussion thread. It takes the load off of doing extra footwork online of having to share links on social networks. Third, post more than 1 time a day to your discussion forum, so search engines will notice you posting to your site often, and index you frequently. If you need more helpful tips, I can write a page on the site and offer some useful suggestions for you to follow. It'll take a good while until you start to see vast amounts of traffic come to your forum, but, posting content everyday to your forum will get you in the positive mindset of creating content and posting, which in turn, benefits your site in getting more traffic from the engines and surviving Google Panda and Penguin updates. Oh, and one more thing...If you own a digital camera, you may want to use YouTube to bring traffic to your site, by posting 1-3 videos a day to your YouTube channel, and include links to specific forum threads in the YouTube video description back to your site. This way, your video viewers will feel enticed to click links and that'll boost traffic + SEO + online ad revenue. Get inspired, buddy. Traffic on the web is like water. You have to keep digging for it. Once you've reached it, it's like making it to the body of water, knowing there's over 1 trillion gallons of water for everyone to enjoy.
A discussion forum takes effort, time to start, first of all, your forum should have content in it, if there is no content, consider posting on regular basis, create some user ids and make 50 to 100 posts each user, in all the sections of the forum, this way your forum would look heavy to general visitors of your forum, your forum would have ranking in search engines too, as you are creating content on regular basis. If you don't have much time for creating content in your forum, you should consider hiring forum posters, forum posters are really very cheap, the normal rate is around $10/100 posts which you can get here in DP forum easily.
That's a pretty good idea. Never thought of doing that. Have you experimented with that way of filling up your forum with content from other people?
You need to get as much content on your site as possible. You can do this by starting threads yourself in all forum categories. The more posts / threads your site has the more people will look into it and be active on it. Try offering something not all other forums in your niche offer be creative post informational articles that contain lots of good keywords. Second advertise yourself and always tell your new members to please spread your site and to let their friends know about the community. Last do not give up keep the forum always running and open as time passes if you play your cards right you will be happy.
Many people hire "forum posters" to get things started. As others have said no one wants to go to an empty forum and make a post. Takes a small crowd to build a large crowd.
Agh I just remembered you can do pay per post. In this case pay a x amount of money per post or per 10x , 20x or what ever posts. Many people will rush onto your forum if you do this but it does cost which sucks. Second you can offer free give always for people that hit certain amount if posts or referral links. You have to be very creative with this and do something someone hasn't offered on their forum at all or for a while.
Interesting ideas everyone, I have a huge forum which I need help with. If someone is keen on growing it with me, feel free to connect.
That you have to do something to run discussion. Use some adwords tool so that people can know about your forum. Try to share impotent and quality content in your forum which help to member. Once you start discussion people will automatic start discussion in your forum. Good Luck...!
Start PTP (Paid To Post) and see the magic. Remember to make some rules for spam posts to keep your forum clean.