What would be best for promoting a new Forum?

Hi,

I am just wondering what could be the best way to promote a forum.

I launched this forum on 1st of June and manage to get 15 member after spreading words around.

Do you think text ads link, google and yahoo ads is suitable for promoting my forum now?

Or shall i include more information, articles and get in more members say 100+ first before using adwords?

Hope to get some advise.

www.kakizone.com


JK

 

Also the ads is not displaying if you dont login?

 

IMHO you shouldn't launch a forum on a new site. First develop content and get traffic.

 

I don't know if adwords is very suitable for a forum, considering you need to get your money back from it.
You can do forum marketing, article marketing, ask related sites to link to your forum etc.

use web2.0 to advertise your forum, post ads on craigslist and other sites like that (just don't spam)

Maybe you should invest in some forum posters to help the initial post count go up.

I checked your forum (if it is the one in your sig you're talking about) and I must say I really like the header.
If you did that yourself great job!

The forum itself is rather wide, isn't it? At first glance it seems as if you're trying to target ten or more niches at the same time.

-investments and banking
-personal finance
-movies
-music
-anime and manga-
-sports
-jokes and cartoons
-email tank
-gaming
-design and photography
-pets
-cooking and recipe
-fitness
-computer
-handphone
-digital camera
-other gadgets
-car and truck
-bikes
-latest world news
and a trading section.

It can be hard enough to find members for a specific niche forum, this could become a harder task then that.
If you can get it off the ground though you could do pretty well, seeing how many topics it covers.

to your success,
jobic

 

You can run a contest; if you design the contest right you would get some new members and posts.
Recently I started a contest on my forum which is running now; so far we got 3500+ new posts, 150+ members just during the contest.

 

Hi Jobic,

Thanks for your advise. I spent a lot of time for this forum idea. And the header, yea i love it very much too.

Reason i create this forum is for info sharing among people. So it should cover as much topic as possible for people to use.

I know is tuff but will try my best.

 

15 people is good going by word of mouth keep that going and you will be doing ok.

main points now are to get rid of the 0's in the post count.

fill those forums up will posts that will help keep members busy looking around

as suggested some form of referral contest is great but a bit too early i think more important you keep the content coming and keep promoting as you are

good luck

 

I sincerely hope it becomes a success.

good luck to you,
jobic

 

webcosmo,

contest is good idea, but some people might not be able to receive payment as they might not have paypal or so.

 

Kevster,

Yea, need to fill up those 0 categories. Trying my best to do so.

Since some of you have visited my forum, may i know if you are a new user, will you register and hang around in this forum with the first impression?

 

Read these two threads. Then, if you have any questions post them here.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=848162

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=851455

Then, if you have any questions post them.

 

Pay people to post in it.

 

In that case you can offer different ways they can get the prize e.g. a gift, cash money via PayPal or so etc. I got good results thought may help you

 

I just signed up to help increase your membership count.

If you want to exchange some links with some of my site please feel free to pm me.
I'd be glad to help as much as I can.

Contest are the way to go. Webcosmo is spot on about how you can offer different prizes for different areas.

 

Hi Webcosmo,

Yea, i am trying to figure out what to offer for contest. Its really good idea for running a contest tho.

and Collegerut, saw your login. thanks for the support. I will PM you.

 

It could do with some action on there. Why not get friends and family involved to add new posts, get people talking.

 

Targeted traffic is another good way to go

 

Here's my 2 cents.

You've made possibly one of the most fundamental errors when trying to drive traffic to a new forum. You've got more forums than members.

I've posted this somewhere else but I'll reitterate it here again.

You need to simplify and generalise the forums so that there isn't so many. Noone will join a forum where there are loads of rarely used forums that basically shouldn't be there. It's a really good way to bounce all your potential customers. A new forum should really only start with maybe 8 different places to discuss MAX. This will also make it easier for you to personally make the site look more active by using multiple accounts as you won't have to post as much. Treat it as supply and demand; if demand for new forums increases, then supply more forums.

I strongly urge you to reduce the number of forums before you do anything in the way of marketing.

 

I would 1st get lots of content built on the site and then build up the traffic to site before I started to market the forum. What niche is the forum for? I think that may depend on how best to market the site.