I've been marketing my forum pretty hard for the last couple of months, but its slow, real slow. Sometimes I wonder if its worth the work. How many members is it for the "make or break" point of forums? I just want to know how hard I've got to keep working on marketing I'm always up for new ideas too, any new and innovetive ideas anybody can share?
The skin doesnt really bother me, I wouldnt say the make or break point for a forum is how many users it has, its how active thoe users you have are. The more active those 156 registered users will affect how many people will join once they come across that forum. No one wants to join a dead forum. You might want to try paying for posts, or offer something when the users reach a certain post count. Its worked for me in the past.
Start interesting topics. Make your members feel like they're involved in the community and that they have something to say.
Activity helps. Watch your topics and make sure there are some interesting posts that are recent, in each topic. Don't let a topic sit idle for a month, even if you just post something yourself. Do you have friends & family? Ask them to post a few times per week for a month or so to get the numbers up. Start a few threads that get people's dander up - that's good for a lot of posts Or if you have a few bucks to spare, do what someone suggested - pay a poster or two for a month of posts, get some new topics in there and keep it active. I'm helping 2 forums to get started, and it's taking a few months to get rolling. Keep promoting it too - don't count on a lot of people just stumbling on it. - I just visited your forum. The skin doesn't bother me. Doesn't attract me either. Maybe you want to come up with something more compelling though, make it more exotic The category titles are really dull. Everyone uses the same stuff over and over again. Do you have any friends who are creative writers? Ask them to come up with some catchy titles for your topics to make them sound appealing. "lizard chat" "snake chat" - whoopee! I mean, what a snore! Now that you've got the forum up and running, go back and try to jazz it up a bit. Try to get it to NOT look like every other forum out there. Experiment with some more images and try to make livelier. It's not bad, it's just -- like every other forum. Good luck
You aren't listed high in the search engines for any of the keywords that you need to be listed under. Definitely need to do some SEO and link building.
Thanks for all the suggestions guys I'm currently sorting out an IPB license so that skin will be replaced by a more subtle green style IPB one. Having IPB with various SEO mods (in particular a url rewrite one) should help alot with SEO. phpBB seems to be pretty poor from a seo point of view (despite me adding lots of seo mods). I have tried the odd bit of paid posting but it didn't really work. With being in such a niche people didn't really know what to say and so the results were pretty poor. Of my friends and family, none of them are into reptiles so they wouldn't know what to say either Nice idea about the topic titles I might make a couple of posts about 'hot topics' to encourage lots of posting, should make the forum look busier
1. get vbulletin or IPB 2. get backlinks 3. bump old interesting topics 4. create controversial topics. 5. if nothing works,Add porn