Thing is, I find it very hard to get it active with people posting. I am a dedicated admin, dedicated to posting new content within my selected niche (music) and I care about the community. I'm not only trying to make money. Anyways, once we get active, I'm looking to add advertisements and premium memberships to rake in some spare cash. Do you guys here at DigitalPoint have any advice for getting my community active? I hear SEO is great for this type of thing, but I have absolutely no clue where to start with SEO. I've been purchasing Fiverr gigs for "real human activity" and I'm getting about 200 unique clicks a day, but the community just isn't too active. I have money to throw down, but I don't know where to throw it. Thanks in advance for any advice you may or may not have!
Okay, let's see. You are currently posting fresh content on a regular basis, that's great. Now, you need to get traffic every now and then when you're posting that new content. Here's how: Create a Facebook page and a Twitter account for your site. Every time a new thread is started, make it so that it's posted to both those accounts using TwitterFeed. TwitterFeed uses RSS feeds from your forum to post automatically to Facebook and Twitter. You'll come to have a bunch of Twitter follower after a little while. By following other people and saying Hi!. Then, create an account on Reddit and StumbleUpon and post link to the new threads there as well. Depending the topic and what's the thread about, it can possibly bring in a lot of visitors. Or just a few, but keep in mind that if it only brings in 1 visitor, it's worth it. You can create a subreddit for your forum too. reddit.com/r/yourforumsname After a little while, you'll be able to spot quality discussions. For example, a thread with about 30 intelligent and interesting replies. It could be a good idea to re-post it again on those 4 social network we covered earlier. What I just suggested you here are good means of bringing a lot of people on your site. The more people visit your site, the more are likely to register and become active members. Hope this helps!
My personal suggestion would be get people to post unique content on your site which would drive traffic towards your forum then i would suggest you to socially promote your website as well as trying to get the community of your website active by random contests/giveaways etc As you have a decent flow of visitors but an equal share of active members then you can introduce ads and premium membership to fetch some income out of your forum. To bone any income from any project you must invest a decent chunk of time and money into it, just read around various threads here on this site and research whats in the trend and you might end up having a good chunk in your hand
As long as you have the social activity going on a regular basis along with the bookmarking, you might want to try some inexpensive keyword campaigning. Sometimes you can run pay per click ads to drive real people to your pages, and these people might buy.