I personally won't stick around a forum if there's one in the same niche with a lot more activity. I hope not everyone has my point of view because I am about to launch a forum in a specific niche. There's not much competition, but I'm sure there will be more than a few boards with more than the 0 posts I start off with. What do you guys do to keep your initial members from giving up on you while you build a community?
Build up the forum with members and posts (paid posts, or your own) and make sure you offer people something worth signing up for. Once you have them signed up, you can send out periodical newsletters, and they'll be much more likely to return.
It's a good idea to get your close friends to join and post. You don't have to pay them (well, you shouldn't have to), and you can easily make them stay active because you can contact them. Contests always keep people interested as well.
What sort of contest could be held to encourage posting? Not the prize- but the format? Something like having a few prizes and giving a user an entry for every post?
OK. Yeah, I won't do the referral thing. I know exactly who my customers are and how to reach them. I should get word of mouths, but I don't have the time to worry about a referral contest. I will do the raffle thing. For every post, they get an entry. I'm sure there's a script that will allow me to do a random drawing with multiple entries per person. As far as webspace and email addresses go, the niche I'll be targeting isn't technical and they won't be interested in webspace or email addresses.
Or you can just visit the forum in my sig And to keep visitors it's important that you have fresh daily content. I believe it's better to create eg 5 posts each day, then post 50 posts on 1 day and nothing for the next couple days.
What makes my forums special (aside content, that's what I create them for) is the looks. I invest a huge deal of time into my skins and they are all unique and (some say) good looking. My visitors come and see an original layout and spend some time reading the good content created by my first members and then decide to stay. Looks are hugely important today, more than anytime before. Our visitors have been seeing many many sites and forums and are educated. A stock theme won't impress them anymore
I think unique looks are important for certain niches, especially online niches like webmaster forums or affiliate marketing forums. For what I'm doing, I think it needs to be branded well, but the general template can be a stock one. My goal is to build an online community to make it easier for a particular offline community to communicate with each other. There aren't many (if any) forums in this niche, so it's more likely than not that the majority of users will not have seen enough forums to be turned off by my stock template.