What are the best ways to start an online community?

What are the best ways to start an online community with QUALITY members that consistently come back?

I have heard of:

• Paid-Posting
• Alias member names
• promotion on forums
• paid for traffic

But what is truely the best way?

 

How do you get them to see that you have just started a forum?

 

If you are integrating a forum into a existing site then you can just create a module to show latest posts. This will get them to check out the forum.

The best way i find to get forums going is to offer your posters something diff. This obviously is all upto you. Maybe an incentive program, I dont like the idea of paid to post as often you get people spamming the forums with useless junk and then they expect you to pay them.

Forums are also quite hard to get into as there are so many established ones out there. As an example, I have an established site with over 10K members, yet, im still trying to get them to post.

thats just my opinion. sorry i couldnt be more helpfull

 

What you need is a core group of users to particpate daily. It's a tough uphill battle but perserverance will pay off.

Traffic from the SEs will help. For this you need content and baclinks. Contests are good but will bring in temporary results. If part of your marketing strategy are contests then you need to do them regularly. Some forums use adwords but if people land in a forum that is not active no one will sign up.

Your first goal should be to try to get about a half dozen people to post regularly. Once you reach that set yourself another target.

 

how would this give you quality traffic? this is only temporary...

 

I have started a few foums and it is very difficult to get them going. The main problem is that people dont want to join a forum with little or no members or posts.

Get friends to try and fill the forum with relevent posts and try to answer questions yourself. This way you will have the most posts which makes you look like you know what your on about and will bring the respect needed.

If you are going to offer to pay people to post i would do it on a limited basis. Say, $5 for 10 relevent posts and then thats it. If they make good posts offer them another go but if you make it an open offer then you may get spammed just for your cash.

Persaverance is the main thing and it may take a while but it is worth it in the end.

Good luck and hope it gets busy soon for you.

ps. can we have a look at the forum

 

Thank you all for your advice.

You can view my forum here


I did get 3 new members yesterday so that's a good sign! Let me know what you think?

 

I just recently started a health forum. I found a competing forum without moderators that has become "depressed." After PMing the top posters to see what is up with the anarchy I scored a few more members, and they have been providing quality content since.

I'm now getting about 20 uniques a day from google, and I expect atleast 5% of google visitors click my adsense.

 

Exhibit A - good forum integration with popular content/tools.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

I use this tool quite a bit. Even though I visit DP Forums by themselves all the time; I frequently find myself at the keyword suggestion tool, dilligently doing research for websites, when all of a sudden I'm drawn into the forums, once again. Maybe it's just because I have the attention span of a minnow.

It happens at least 5 times a week.

 

I've started 3 different forums. The first two were essentially flops. The most recent one has been growing like crazy and is doing exceptionally well. Basically 100+ users within a week and a half.

Here are the keys to quickly grow a forum:

1 -- filter traffic from an existing traffic source. The traffic has to be relevent.

2 -- there needs to be a reason for people to post. Some people have suggested money. I suggest a questions and/or requests section.

3 -- find 4 or 5 people who like the topic. Friends rambling don't cut it.

4 -- treat the heavy posters very well.

 

It's a Marketing & Advertising Forum with Subforums such as Search Engines, SEO, FREE Advertising, Online Money Making and more.

I think this would be an easy starting point, since those topics are a good spark of interest. However, i've only had 3 new members and 2 that come back daily.

Adwords didn't work for me and i don't want to pay for posting. I am about to pay one of my friends to post some ads for me and am willing to pay anyone to get the word out about it.

My daily traffic is on the low end, 30 uniques or more a day.

Any other advice?

 

Getting people in forum to write is hard, most people just like to read, they don't want to write. Like me in my last forum I was in, it took 3 years before I started writing. This forum I'm in it has 75k members, I would say only 15,000 of them post 3-4 times perweek, the rest just read. And only the lounge is alway active, the rest of the forum is slow. Best way is to get your friend, coworker and family to write topic for you, this will make it look active, and people will start posting. Just curious what made you start a forum? I notice so many people are starting it.

 

I started it as a hobby. I enjoy forums and I figured why not start one myself. I got 10 new members last night!

 

It depends on whether or not you want to spend money. If you are willing to pay their are plenty of people here at DP who are willing to go in and start threads. If however you are cheap, just go in and have conversations with yourself until your forum looks like you have lots of members and suddenly your visitors start making posts.

 

I've had a couple forums that failed. I got my most recent forum going by starting contests and paying people to post.

 

So far this forum has been the most succesful of my 3 tries. I do not want to pay for posting.

Update: My friends advertising brought me 12 new members in one day.

 

I too have just started a new forum and are experiencing similar problems.

I recently had to change domains due to legal reasons and my established forum had to be changed. Although my members did not post on the new forum. I also was getting a lot of unique hits from google and yahoo but this new site has no content to be indexed as yet. I had about 100 members that were activel posting on my forum and about 10 that made up about 40% of the posts. When u get a good poster you want to keep them happy cause they will make the forum.

andrew

 

The vast majority of forums will fail, which is when the webmaster decides to quit promoting it and give up.

However to imropve the odds of success I recommend the following:

Hiring 2-4 forum postering services At Once! That way they can comunicate with each other like a real community. Althoug this can cost upwards of $100 is is worth it.

Then once you have some posters and a bunch of threads promote your forum with a signature link on other forum sites.

Invest in Vbulletin. It is much more expensive than PHPbb or others but it has the best user interface, which is condusive to starting discussions. You get what you pay for.