When starting a Forum, how do you get more members to join?

Is it the Chicken that came first or the Egg? It's a Chicken & Egg problem.

Starting a forum's is a wonderful thing, but it also requires a lot of work build it up, but I know you can do it.

You will have to come up with clever techniques for inviting people and continue to build backlinks to the forum.

If you also like writing, you can attach a blog to your forum and use the blog to encourage your blog subscriber's to join your forum.

I wish you all the best.

You get friends and people you know to join, or you pay people to fill it. It won't promote itself either. I've been down this road before and can tell you it's all about content: no good content= no new members.

It's definitely hard to get a forum active. I have two forums and they aren't active either. Though they haven't been online quite a year yet.

I registered some users myself and use them to post in topics and start topics.
I know it feels weird talking to yourself. But I guess it's a start.

I got the idea from lisa on her forum websitebabble. She registered some fake users and talked to herself on her forum until it got active.

Chad

I currently have 88,000 people in my forum, but that forum has been up over nine years. Getting the first 100 members was hard work and I suggest calling people up. Also, put in some moderators to help you clean up spam. It is a lot of work for just one person. I also have many spammers join me. It is easy to spot em.

x6347z n27yn35v is a spammer
Fred Thompson is a person

zoer57743@hotmail.com is a spammer
John_Berry@willowgreengrass.com is a person

Look for lots of grammar errors. That is typical of a spammer. Often they will write a few posts that are inane. Then later on, after you turn moderation off, they turn on a spam cannon.

Bribe visitors to be the members.

Are there already forums in your niche?

if there aren't have you considered that your target audience might not want to communicate through a forum?

If you have a list send them a survey to find out.

Also, you can ask your list (if they do like forums) what would get them to join.

Another thing that I would do is sit down and brainstorm some really hot topics or questions in your niche and post those.

A topic that would get visitors to want to join in on the conversation when they see it.

Personally forums like much of the rest of the internet is a little like some fictional fantasy world. The only way to get people to use and interact on a forum is through creating lots of fake users and then interacting with those users. Personally i have tried this myself on my forum, but after a couple of months of having the forum on line, i keep putting the forum of line because i never have the time or energy to start faking the forum in order to make it look good and real. Were i am at not, is i am thinking of hiding it from google and web users and then re-activating it when it is populated. The problem is most CPM networks do not allow you to use advertising in the forum and CPC is probably better focused in a content site. So to cut a long story short you have to balance whether it is worth while spending countless hours attempting to get a forum operational, which may never gain a user base and may never earn a profit.

I started off a forum that currently has 5K members and over 50K posts by paying users per post.

I went on tons of money forums where people will do labour for cheap and paid out people about $0.1 per post. I also had contests where people would enter a raffle to win $100 if they made just 10 posts. I did all kinds of stuff really... I also bought forum content imports related to my niche to make it look filled up and have discussions.

There are a lot of creative ways to get a forum 'filled' up first, then buying paid traffic and getting genuine members.

You bought iPads beforehand? Then it isn't luck, you don't know marketing.

It is not too hard. You need to make up to date your site as well as your forum. Offer some attractive offers and see the results. Give responsibility to someone experience to moderate your forum and don't allow spammer. They would just bring harm to your site.

Starting a forum it's very hard if you don't have visitators yet. If you manage to start one thread that will catch interest, and rank it in google, you might have some real users.

I found it was pretty easy growing my forum. But I also had a wide network of sites that pointed to it incase people wanted to ask questions to articles etc. If you run multiple sites related to the niche your forum will be, you can link to your forum in all your articles. (Be sure to also post interesting things in your forum as well.)

Adwords can be a better option. You can get some real members through it. It is very important to keep a forum well moderated to get the maximum benefit out of it. If there are a lot of spam in a forum, google will not love to visit that forum often and your forum will never get the maximum exposure.

I'd think that it would be almost a full time
job running a successful forum...

how the heck do you moderate all of it...
keep out the spam?

It takes time. Make sure all of your traffic is going to your forum page (should be home page if this is the main objective of your site), and entice them to return with a freebie of some sort that you can offer assist of. You will want to generate a lead with the freebie so that you can email them and bring them back to your forum to interact on the board.

you are not wrong there....

forums are hard work but when they gather pace they are exciting and you can make some good money.

you need to be determined and have a vision on what you would like to achieve and stick to it....

good luck

Danny


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Depends what niche you are in. Some niches have a real small following online and you may even have to bait them offline and get them to swim online for the goodies on your forum.

Just depends...

Perfect thread for me. Forum in the Sig. Struggling to get people to the site, despite hours and hours of work. I have an SEO guy and so on.

Personally I wouldn't give out the niche......

A forum is a forum... the fundamentals are the same no matter what the niche and for those of you who think a forum will fail because of a small following that is absolute BS....

A forum will fail if you give up!!!

The forum needs to be busy and you need to look and see what your competitors are doing (if there are any) and see how they screw up and offer a better experience....

Danny

People don't join an empty forum! Here are a few tips that I learned when I had a forum a few years back.

Keep the categories at the beginning small so they look fuller! After some time you can add more categories and start to fill them up.

I set up 200 accounts (my own) and had conversations with myself! After a few weeks and a few new sign ups I stopped using them and had conversations with real people. After the first 100 signed up, I spend most of my time moderating and adding in a comment here and there.

Always answer questions, if people are getting answers to their questions they are more likely to come back (and tell their friends).

Offer some kind of affiliate service for your members. If they get 5 people to sign up and post 20 posts, you'll pay $5 or whatever. Be careful with this, it's open to abuse. Have clear guidelines about ip addresses, etc. etc.

But this worked for me before the forum was sold.

I agree with the others, you have to take whatever steps necessary to "simulate" an active forum in the beginning in order generate enough content to snowball into a genuinely active forum. I have no interest in participating in any forum that isn't pretty damn active, unless the topic is so incredibly niche that there's really no where else to go.

One thing that might help is to plug into social networks so people don't have to register on your forum. I think it's a huge pain in the ass to register anywhere for anything, especially knowing that I'm just signing myself up for more spam. If you do require a signup, keep it as minimal and quick as possible. Although I'm not personally too keen on using Facebook/Twitter as a login in every situation, plenty of people are. What saves them time makes them more likely to engage. Keep it clean, active, quick, and easy, and you're off to a great start.

Post a contest thread in the contest sub forum. First person to reach 1000 useful informative posts gets $500 dollars paypal

Or something similar

Start by posting a bunch of content yourself. Treat it like a blog and answer questions that people in your niche might be looking for, then they'll start to find you. Also, invite people! If you come across somebody you think would be an asset to your forum, send them a personal message asking them to join. The ball really starts to roll once you have some good people offering real value to one another.

Hi:

Getting traffic to a forum means you need to have some content that people are searching for. It does take a lot of effort to get members, and you can attempt to get some by posting in other forums that have a related topic to yours, thus creating a backlink. Be careful though, you want to be genuine because if this is done incorrectly, it looks like you're spamming other forums.

How about funneling people from your facebook fan pages to the forum? It is easier to get people to join a fan page than a forum. Just offer incentives to the fans so they move to the forum.

Forum is like FB fanpage, you need real people inside. find right audience on your specific niche. If you have hundreds of spammers try cleaning it, you will determine who are the spammers and the real audience

I actually own a huge forum that is very busy and makes me a very nice income

But i suppose I know nothing about forums.... In fact I don't know anything about making money online and driving traffic to sites.... so ignore me completely

Here is one great advice for you.

1. Find a handful list of tops sites related to your area of specialization and see if they allow ads. Place advert with them for a month and track where your traffic comes most from and repeat the process. It is important to have a good banner/content ads solving your target market needs.

2. You can get in touch with sites related to your area of specialization that do not have forums and see if you can create a sub domain for them on your forum. This way they will be referring visitors to your site at no cost to you.

3. There to include some kind of incentive, however, do not run this from your advertising budget but rather from the profit you make from your forum

4. Build a site in your forum niche, add your forum as sub page and rank your website for your keywords. Making your site interactive with social media will greatly help many of your facebook, twitter, myspace friends to join your forum.

5. Try to create activity, people love active forums.. Aim to maintain and sustain the traffic that comes to your site.

6. Collect their names through list building and blast new, important/controversial threads to them occasionally.

7. Do not give up, slow and steady wins the game..

Typical warrior response that :-)

Well done :-)

Danny

Forums get off the ground if there's an expert (usually the forum owner) in the niche posting frequently and helping people on a full-time basis until the forum gains traction on its own.

Expect a lot of work. Running a forum is A LOT OF WORK at the beginning until you gain trusty moderators, plenty of active members, etc.

First: Make sure there is a market large enough for your forum. Don't build the product first..
Second: Make it easy as hell to register. I don't want to double opt-in just to make a damn post on an empty forum.
Third: Take it back to common sense. Ask yourself, "What benefit does the user gain from joining my forum? Am I offering something so irresistible that they are compelled to join?
Fourth: Do I have enough content? Is my forum a ghost town?