I have just launched a forum for computer professionals www.csgenius.com. I am facing problems in developing a community. Can some body tell me how to get free traffic?
Well most new forums are paying new members to post, to kinda make the forum popular. I am signing up, hope it helps Good luck... nice forum
Yes, hiring companies to post (such as ours) is a good way to get a forum started. You can get excellent deals for posters to start a few threads and make some posts to get everything started for others.
You just launched these forums? May I ask why you are using vB 3.0.5? Also, your slogan is...wrong. "The largest computer science forum" ...it's fine to say stuff that can't be proven, such as "The best place to come for computer science"...but saying that you are the largest computer science forum, when you are clearly not, leaves a bad impression on me as a visitor. Get a new design....it's just clear that you have not put much time or effort into your forums as they are completely stock...no special content/articles anywhere...etc...Sorry to sound so negative about all of this, but forums are a lot of work and in order to be successful, you need to perform that work...and I don't see much so far in your forums.
Social Bookmarking is a source of free traffic, just be mindful of the ToS's of the various sites you use. Post exchanges, paid posting, RSS feeds, and the like can all generate content, which in turn can mean better SERP, or SERP in general. SE traffic is certainly free. Directory submissions can also give you a few perks, and I suggest using the thousands of free directories out there. Spend a few minutes a day and submit to three or four of them till the list is completed. You can even enlist a few forum members to help. Give such members a few perks, and I bet they would be happy to submit to a directory or two daily... Article submissions can be effective as well. Write a nice article, and link it to a thread for discussion. To get around the duplicate content filters, only put snippets of the article in the actual thread, with the real content on the article directory. Blog comments. If you find a blog that discusses something in your forum, you can often add some additional content to the blog and link to a given thread. Though be mindful of the blog, and be sure to add content along with your link, or it'll never make it out of the moderation queue and be flagged as spam. Forum signatures on related forums can also help generate free traffic and site recognition. You can trade your sig with other like minded people and it can be a free venture... Either way though, it goes beyond just traffic, you need your traffic to convert. So that means you should focus on content, and have as many threads as you can to help prompt people to not only join, but to interact.