Which do you think will happen first? I've tried 3 different forums in various niches with no success one has been up for over 3 years! I think I will try for plan b and win the lottery or get struck by lighting.
I logged onto your forum and see I was the only person on your site (user or guest). How do you expect a bustling forum without a lot of traffic?
From somewhere on the internet: Odds of winning the Lottery = 120,000,000:1 Odds of being struck by Lightning = 2,650,000:1 Put it this way, you are 45 more times likely to get struck by lightning then win the lottery. So you can pretty much forget about it. I don't know the figures for a sucessful forum, you might be better off buying an established forum, rather than starting one from scratch.
100% agree, buy established, its really the best way. As for the lightening thing if i were you i would be thinking about buying some real THICK soled shoes lol
I have constant traffic on my 3 year old forum and it only has 800 posts. http://www.lt1engine.com/forum/
Promoting a forum is not all that hard, as there are many ways to do it, and the most easiest would be simply adding content. Content is what draws in the members as well, well, content followed by good discussion. It takes more then just setting up a forum to make it popular. Promotion, content building, link building, and the like all NEED to have a roll in how things work, but it does not stop there either... as the members need to help things along as well, and getting them to do that in the beginning can be rather difficult. It can be faked of course, by having friends & family use multiple accounts to interact, though that is a deception and can shine back a bad light.
Sorry man, but when I go to a page and I'm the only one one currently on, thats not "constant traffic" thats zero traffic. I have a forum with over 300 guests/bots/members logged in the last 30 hours and its STILL VERY slow. Getting a forum bustling is very difficult. I don't understand how you can think anyone is gonna go to your forum when it never has no one visiting the site.
It's not the quantity it is the quality. What would you rather have 10,000 post forum with 100% spam or 800 posts that have good content? See what I am trying to say? Basically build some more content. Start filling the forums up yourself. See the results when you advertise then.
Even filling up the forums yourself wont do good if you have zero traffic. You need at least a few hundred visits a day to get a forum going. Im gonna tell you a secret guys. Getting a bustling forum is overrated. Most repeate forum visitors are trolls and bandwith wasters. Its the random first time visitors that click ads.
Forums are overrated. I own 3 of them and run 13 blogs and a bunch of other sites too. Forums require the most work and are the least profitable out of all of them.
Forums have been for me very profitable. Adam the first problem I see is that your forum appears to have a very small audience. Not really a subject to start a bustling forum about. And 3 attempts in 3 years is well...not that hearty of a go. I start 10+ forums a year at least. I increase my odss of success greatly. When one starts to move...I give it the attention it deserves and it continues to grow. Look for niches with a core audience that is passionate and will make sense for a community. Some successful niches for me: Video Games Politics Computing MMA Music Seems like no brainers. 10,000 posts...traffic and activity have VALUE...and it's impossible that 10,000 posts are ALL spammy. I am happy with my forums getting 1000 posts a day and if just 5% of those are decent good threads it's something. Forums are often filled with idle chatter that's borderline spam. However it's attractive to visit a site for the first time and see it's active. Activity begets activity.