Hey everyone, Anyone have any good tips on how to get a forum started and get people to start contributing? Any general marketing tips to get members and have them actually submit content would be awesome. Cheers
If you want people to provide your content, give them a reason. Either pay for posting, start a contest on your forum, or offer to answer their questions about your niche... Once there are enough people on your forums, it will draw more users by itself.
I think paying for post will make you content laim. Usually i go to places my target audience is surf on and try to lore them.
I found www.theadminzone.com very good when I was starting my forum. It's dedicated to starting/running a forum so has some good tips. I've also had some joy from post exchange schemes and have participated in this one for a few years now - www.aardvarkinternet.net/chat
For forum marketing you can hire people to post or reply recent thread. discuss about your forum on other forums and ask people to contribute there too.
When I started my very first forum, I used a "no registration" element. This was to build up as much content as I could! When I had enough content, then I focussed on members & gradually phased out the no registration element.
Everyone I know pays for posting, or uses some sort of yahoo questions scraping tool to generate content in the very beginning. Forums are very hard to get running.
It is difficult to get a forum going. I can take years to really get going if you don't already have a large audience to compliment it. Like all things, paying for the services of somebody to post can be good or bad, depends on what you get!