In order to encourage guests to sign up, the forum has to catch the guests eye and make them carry on looking at the site and maybe sign up.  The main way to catch the guests attention is to make the forum attractive.

The main ways to do this is as follows:-

• Have a nice looking style.  Make sure it is not too bright and not too dark either.  If possible try and have more then 1 style available as that can be a good promotional point so when people visit they might think i hate this style although if i sign up i could use their other one instead. Try to stay away from using the soft-wares default forum style as well as these tend to be overused and makes it look like not much time has been spent on the forum by the owner.
• Not have excessive clutter on the index page such as chatrooms/shoutboxes, excessive codes like marques, different colour texts, too many ads, pop-ups and other codes.  Anything you do add like affiliates, try to ensure that they are nice and tidy and look clean and not all over the place.
• Have a banner from your site and try to ensure it has your site name.  Try not to have it excessively big as people don’t want to always have to scroll down a lot to see the forum.  Also ensure that the file size is not too big.  The bigger the file size is the longer it takes to load.  The longer a site takes to load the less chance guests will sign up as they will get bored of waiting and just move on.  The same goes for excessive codes and so on on the index page as that slows the forum load time down also.
• Ensure that the text is easy to read on the site and that your site is cross browser compatible.  If you site works in one browser it might not work in others and you could lose a lot of people because the forum looks messed up
• If you use external hosts link imageshack and photobucket for example ensure that the images are always available as sites where images don’t show, expecially the logo or buttons put people of from signing up.

If you follow all these and the things in Part 1 then you should be able to encourage a much larger percentage of guests to sign up to your forum.  It does take a lot of work but it is worth it if you want your forum to be successful.

One of the main things people forget when making and promoting their forum is guests.  Guests are what members start out like before they register.  It is important to keep this in mind when making your forum and promoting it as the site will have to be appealing of the people visiting won’t sign up.

One major thing people do is restrict the guest access.  That is fine to prevent them from seeing profiles, memberlist, who is online and posting posts and topics.  It is not good to hide all the forums from guests or restrict what they can see in the forums.  As a member your forum may look good with loads of forums and loads of good posts and content but how will the guests which are your future members see what your forum has to offer if the see a blank forum?

A few top tips:

• Open as many forums to guests to read as possible
• If you have a forum with content that you really don’t want guests to see such as downloads then make the forum visible but don’t give them permission to read the topics so they can see the forum exists and what topics there are but they can’t see the contents.  Or attach the downloads as attachments (if available) and not allow guests to download the attachments.
• If you have content that you don’t want guests or members to see hide it from view.  This is things like staff sections as there is nothing worse i think then going to a forum and seeing forums that 95% of people can’t enter.  You may as well make it hidden to everybody apart from staff.

This will make your forum more appealing to guests when you start promoting it and will increase the amount of members alot more then if you hide everything from guests.  If you have any more suggestions to get your forum more attractive for guests then post a comment below and i will add it into part 2.