Driving traffic to a forum in 2021?

I'd start with the social network groups, contributing to discussions and definitely letting people know about your forum after you have been established as a non-spammer.

You have something called a Barrier to Entry here to work through.

There is already a very well known cybersecurity magazine, which I am a subscriber to, called the CyberWire. They have industry partners, which are listed on their site and that I would check out. You obviously have an overlapping audience with the CyberWire, which would be the first place I would look to exploit.

Maybe you can run one of those annoying traffic source checks on their site.

But I would go at it from the partners. Who are they? Where do their employees and followers hang out? How can you get in front of them?

Is there anyone with an existing audience that overlaps the one you want, who you could develop a deal with to access?

What value can you provide that is not already provided by a similar online publication? Could be your focus and the specific content you bring because of that; your point of view; the audience segment you choose to serve.

That Barrier to Entry protects you from competition. Without money to spend on investigating traffic sources, developing lookalike audiences and buying lists, you need to do some spade work. But the fact is this very work makes potential competitors give up quickly when they see it's going to take effort.

I started a forum 3 years ago. It was going quite well but I abandoned the project due to security concerns about phpBB (like I really want to get sued by a member of a forum that makes me no money!!!).


My #1 growth hacking technique was to look for closed down forums and websites and try to lure in the members of those sites. It worked very well indeed. As I'm benched due to covid I might turn site resurrecting into a little side project later in the year.