Just opened brand new forums, now how to get traffic?

Hello,

Yesterday, I just released my brand new tech forums. I'm wanting to build up a large community of dedicated members, but I'm not really sure how to get these members. Any ideas?

Forums: https://mytechforums.com

Thanks,
Christian

 

I'm not sure why I would want to narrow the niche down. The forums are suppose to be open to pretty much all tech discussion.

 

Narrowing it down to a specific niche enables you to focus on an area you're good at and hopefully in an area with less forums looking down that road making it easier to establish an active following. Really, there are so many tech forums, blogs etc though you can always expand into other areas as your forum grows.

As for your forum itself, I rather like the design. I did notice a large gap in the header section (I guess for ads placement?) might want to have that removed or fill it. Not a fan of the logo

Otherwise good luck .

 

Hey there! Yes, the gap is for Google Adsense, however, Google has not yet approved my Adsense application, so I'm waiting on that. What could I do to improve the logo? I am gonna try to narrow down the niche soon.

 

You can engage in paid advertising (Google, Forums etc) , buying traffic and also hire paid posting to make your community activity. In my opinion, paid posting is the most important and valued for money as visitors would tend to stay and participate in an active community. Paid advertising is costly, so I might not do it until the community is "active" while buying visitors might not give as good result depending on the source of traffic.

Besides the logo which need to be redo, I personally find that your forum is too bright and "floaty", it would be better if you can just tone down on the brightness a little and use themes with fixed width.

 

You need to invest in a good forum script such as vbulletin or Xenforo. Your objective of having a large community will not be achieved with free forum software.

 

The thing is, I don't really have a budget for paid advertisement :/ I could try making the theme a bit darker, but I don't think that's the issue. I don't want fixed width because I want it to look good on mobile too. As for the logo, I just have to re-make it. As stated before, I don't have the budget for Xenforo. I've always liked Xenforo but it's so expensive!

 

Never really thought of forums as solving a problem, and people always say my forums are too "general" and they need to be more specific, but what makes DigitalPoint specific? They have sections for everything like I do. Just curious. You could ask me why I use it and my answer would be because it has a nice community, and I like it as a place for tech discussion, since all the people in my house don't know much about tech.

 

It's not gonna happen overnight.

You need to put real shit together and work your ass to get it working.

I suggest you start looking for areas where people with tech problems hang out and reach out to them either through advert or promotion.

Search for top tech blogs and see if they can allow you a space on their site, you can also offer them a complete sub-section if that's what it takes to entice them.

Don't rule out paid ads like adword and facebook PPC, they would give you an edge.

Find keywords relevant to tech and their problems and rank your home page and some relevant sub pages.

This is enough to make you a big player in your niche dude..

 

True. I'm gonna work on getting some tools going

 

I would have to disagree. There are lots of very popular forums running on free software, people won't choose one forum over another based on it being a commercial software or not. More the content and activity that is happening.

 

Create a project and get people from other forums to come to yours. or just put your forum in the signatures on various forums

 

Go on several Facebook groups related to your niche and advertise your site

 

Then again ask yourself this as the visitors who check the forum will, why should I say? Getting people to visit your forum isn't good enough, you need them to stay.

 

My first forum I created was for creating games. I visited game engine forums and asked people to work on a great project online and we used my forum to create it. Then these people stayed

 

That is your reason to stay, a gaming project which is not having the same done on 1000 other forums. The above forum does not have such a project, it is just a general tech forum hence our suggestions / tips to create that something to give visitors a reason to remain active.

 

Yes I know exactly what you mean. If the OP finds a projects that would get people interested in joining then move the development to their forum, this could work.