Hey everyone! I've recently released a new forum and I'm trying to think of some ways to get people to sign up and start posting. The website is a blog about VoIP and it has a pretty good amount of traffic lately. I'm offering free voicemail boxes on a toll free number and free email addy's from my domain for the first 50 people that sign up and start posting. What else would be an acceptable way to get people to sign up and start posting?
Have something on the website other than the forum itself to attract traffic. Like free download or membership of a VOIP client.
Well the website itself is a fairly successful blog, so I imagine once readers visit the site, they will sign up for that as well. Well, some of them will I imagine.
How about hiring one of those companies that create accounts on your site and make posts. That makes a forum look busy and helps attract more new users.
Yeah, Google "forum posting" or "pay to post". If you have enough interesting topics and discussions on your forum, people will want to join in. Tom
I found a forum (that looks fairly busy) that is used for this sort of thing. Basically you post your offer on there, and people who are interested in posting on your topic will go to your site and post for the money. It looks decent. I'll try to find some reviews on how their traffic posts.
A lot of new posts a day (topics), some post exchanges and continuous work. I have created an article that might help you From empty forums to a community. I am the owner of 9 forums now, some small, some bigger so I tried to put down in articles what I learnt all this time. Maybe it helps
Have a big party, and have a few of your friends bring their laptops to you house. Welcome everyone that visits, and have them join before they do anything else. You will have fun, and at least 50 more members.
if the forum is completely baren, get some content in there. get your friends to post, make some dupe accounts, pay someone to post, whatever. no one finds an empty forum appealing. if you're past that stage you're doing better than a lot of people. at there are a number of things you can do: 1) install hacks that increase registrations. examples include not showing links unless you're a member and having a "welcome header." both of these are on vbulletin.org if you run vb. 2) plug your forum in your content. a lot. don't just have it in the side navigation. at the end of every page of content (or the middle, even !) have an enticing plug for your forum. 3) if you have a mailing list of your users, announce it there 4) give access to some neat freebies for registering you can also give incentives for posting, but then you have to balance that against the possible spam it'd encourage, etc. I personally don't do it, but you could.