So yesterday I decided to buy the domain http://www.energycrysis.net, and today I have pretty much set it up. I still have to add adsense (but that can come much later) and fix a bug for firefox users not being able to register. That said - now what? Do I create 10 accounts and talk with myself (ugh), hire posters, get a script which utilizes yahoo answers, ??? I know forums are a lot of work to kick off the ground, so if you can share some tips that would be great Thanks in advanced, BenderFry
Just start talking to yourself. Write some good content on there and post a link back on other forums for people to read the entire thing.... It is very time consuming. Lots of forums just die..ask friends and family to join and talk to them. Find blogs and make real comments and include your link in them. Or just hire people if you have the money..haha Good Luck
Talk to yourself, make sure the talk is reasonably keyword rich. And prepare for lots of work. Unless you have shit loads of money or get lucky, you're gonna have to work real hard to make new forum board successful.
Thanks for the advice. I have started talking to myself - And I'm going to get some forum posters and use $5... IMO worth it if it helps the forum not look "dead". 40 threads is better than 10. I'am going to also try and recruit friends and family.. it is a topic stirring heat so maybe I can get some of my professors and such. Thanks for the advice. BenderFry
Forums require alot of time and effort and i advise you to have a good budget for advertising as its not going to be easy for making money fast from the forum
In blunt honesty, pray like hell. Most forums fail shortly after starting and many more fail a few months later. You need to be dedicated, have a good budget, and promote the heck out of. Most people do not have what it takes to keep up and that is the reason for failure. You need to get active and stay active with a few accounts. You need to start promoting the forum in any related forum or website you can. Go wherever the people are that will use your forum. $5 is not even a drop in the bucket of what you will need for good promotion and hiring posters. You need to work all the time and do what you can to get members. It takes a good while to get a forum started and if you have patience and can keep up, it could turn out to be a good money maker.
What niche is your forum in? Why not turn it into an ad revenue share forum. Could be one way for you to get people posting. Just a suggestion. Otherwise i would recomend paying people to post but its hard to find good posters that are worth the money.
Well, if you don't want to talk to yourself you can hire others to talk to themselves but in order for a forum to attract people it must have the appearance of being active.
Talking to the wall is a start Others already mentioned some excellent tips for you. I would just suggest add useful content for others. That will bring in new visitors from search engines and visitors would stay interested in your forum.
Wow thanks for all these suggestions.. I will definitely use all of them.. For the first day I am going to try bookmarking sites like digg, stumbleupon, reddit, etc. I have submitted my news release to digg (Top 8 Alternative Fuels) and I will see how that gets along. delrivo to answer your question: it is in the Energy Crisis/Global Warming niche. I noticed that there weren't any really good forums in that category (atleast that I could find)... And since its a topic that interests me, I just had to make the forums.
What ever happened to friends? Get a few of your friends together and ask them to help you out in creating activity for your forum. Myspace isn't bad for finding people to join forums. Just go looking through their groups for people who are interested in your forum's niche. Throw a couple ppc dollars at it for some recognition. No need to go digging through your wallet, just a few bucks. The CTR probably won't be great, but if you're advertising with the search network, those who actually click through probably won't mind signing up if the thread titles are interesting enough. Just make sure you mention "Discussion" and "Sign Up/Join/Register" in your ad. If you've got any friends who hold moderator positions anywhere (or who have their own websites), ask them to make a post about your forum. Chances are, if their peers think that they find it interesting, they'll want to check it out too. Good luck with the forum
Promote your forum! There are many places you can go to start out. You can try out my site which is fairly new: www.PostExchanger.com or you can visit these other ones that can also help you out. www.forumadvertiser.com hireem.net/ http://addmyforum.forumotion.com Good Luck.
Find a social network that's related to your traffic and share it with them. Discuss some catchy issues so that people will have an interest to comment.
It's not recommended as all the content is duplicate. Site looks good.But, if you add a light border around it.. it will look more nicer.
You can hire forum poster. You can setup a forum plugin that using ads revenue sharing system I'm sure by having those plugin,you can increase your member base
I love the ads revenue sharing idea! Problem is, for now, my forum doesn't really have a suitable place for ads (atleast that I can manage to get too). I could add one after the first post, and inbetween two categories but thats about it really. I wouldn'tve minded adding a rotator type ad like on the top right of DigiP. Problem is I am quite a newbie when it comes to PHP ><. I will see what I can do. Thanks for all the advice everyone! BenderFry EDIT: I have done very basic SEO - Friendly URLS and Meta Tags.. Have no clue how to do the robots.txt file or headers??? EDIT 2: I have done the robots.txt file but I am not sure if it is correct. User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*?action Disallow: /*sort= Disallow: /*msg Disallow: /administrator/ Disallow: /cache/ Disallow: /components/ Disallow: /editor/ Disallow: /help/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /includes/ Disallow: /language/ Disallow: /mambots/ Disallow: /media/ Disallow: /modules/ Disallow: /templates/ Disallow: /installation/ User-agent: Slurp Disallow: /*?action Disallow: /*sort= Disallow: /*msg Disallow: /administrator/ Disallow: /cache/ Disallow: /components/ Disallow: /editor/ Disallow: /help/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /includes/ Disallow: /language/ Disallow: /mambots/ Disallow: /media/ Disallow: /modules/ Disallow: /templates/ Disallow: /installation/ User-agent: * Disallow: /administrator/ Disallow: /cache/ Disallow: /components/ Disallow: /editor/ Disallow: /help/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /includes/ Disallow: /language/ Disallow: /mambots/ Disallow: /media/ Disallow: /modules/ Disallow: /templates/ Disallow: /installation/ Disallow: /index.php?action If it is wrong please let me know. Thanks!
Never give up! Getting a forum off the ground is very discouraging and it can take over a year to get a decent member base. So keep working at it by building content and promoting it. You can submit articles to directories that point back to a thread for discussion, as that will pull in a few as well as give you link backs. Directory submission is also cheap, find the free lists and submit to one or three a day till the list is completed. Trade signature links with other forum members (on other forums) Just keep at it.