Recommendations regarding an internet forum?

Checking your sig.. promoting on a million+ facebook groups would be a good place to start.. why not try that?

You could pay for postings to get it started, I have done that in the past.

I know *why* you're doing it, but man....creating fake accounts to falsely populate a new forum just rubs me the wrong way.

I know....what kind of marketer am I anyway?

I won't say rather it's right or wrong...just not something I would personally do.

Having once run a semi-successful forum, I can tell you that it's really, REALLY tough to get going. If you stay with it, you'll reach a tipping point where the forum begins to snowball and bring in members on its own.

But until then? You've got to be patient. All the traditional stuff works. It just takes TIME.

~Mike

Have you ever heard of TheAdminZone?

It is to forums what this forum is to oodles of money.

Lloyd is correct in what he says though, most forum members never post but simply sit there...forums are amongst the hardest things to give birth to and one of the hardest things to keep alive as you must give the posters a reason to keep coming back everyday, and that is the most important point...why is your forum something someone can give a damn about?

If you are chasing a niche instead of being a pioneer then forget it, you may get a few hundred initial members but unless you do something completely different from the inevitable competition who will be so much larger and well established than you do then you will never get off the ground.

I do not have direct experience of ever starting a successful forum, I have never found a niche that was not already dominated but I have been an admin and mod on many of them and see the same problems.

Have you ever read Sun Tzu?

I highly recommend it for you

People need a cause, it doesn't matter really what that cause is, it could be saving the pandas or fighting for the noble cause of allowing you to wear a frilly pink tutu in the desert while on military parade...so long as people have a cause that they can get behind or recognise a need and a yearning for a leader then you will naturally be able to step in.

Allen did it here with his internet marketing information, weight watchers did it over their with their campaign against otherwise happy people and telling them they are ugly...MSE in England did it by telling businesses enough was enough and demanding lower prices and saving money.

My point is that everyone needs a forum like this, and if you are the first or can satisfy a need the others don't then you too can become a leviathan.

This is normal and if you want your forum to take off in current situation there is no other way unless you really have some super, duper specific revolutionary niche and I don't. I mean, I'm competing with 10 year old forums for Christ's sake.

This is my aim really.

I've seen many forums struggle and the magic of getting
the right group of people (not all the people who agree
with each other) to get the momentum going seems to
be a trial and error (plus a lot of luck) business.

I wish I could put my finger on just why one forum
succeeds and the other fails but attracting the right
people should be top of your list.

Moderation is another headache, and just where to
draw the balance. Like any other website you need
traffic and attention is becoming a scarcer commodity
than just a few years ago before the social networking
revolution. So it's harder to start this time than a few
years back.

-Ray Edwards

A case in point, do you remember a few months ago with Simon Cowell and Facebook?

A crusade was started to keep him off #1 at Christmas, it worked really well because while people love The X Factor they had direction and a goal and a relentless leader motivating them into action.

Simon Cowell eventually offered them a job but that isn't the point...they got together 500,000 people for an insane campaign and won against Goliath.