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.