I have about 100 posts in my forum, but they're all from postloop! It's posts which is good, but they're not genuine in my eyes as they are gained for points on another persons postloop...I need to start expanding to genuine posts. I do the following:
Twitter feed tweets new posts every so often
Facebook page
Signature ads
Posted pages and discussions to stumble upon and digg
Promotion forums
I'm probably missing a few important steps, what are some ways I can reach out and get genuine posts and members?
I have no idea how PostLoop works, but try asking your friends to sign up on your forum and create some activity by starting a few threads and posting a few replies to the threads that you started...
I hate to be blunt, but that's all part of starting a forum. In my experience, you really won't start getting any "genuine" posts until you're in the low x,xxx post range. Starting a forum is a lot of hard work, and you've really got to build up content and try to get the ball rolling yourself, along with help from Postloop. That's why you see the founder of a lot of forums with tens of thousands of posts; because that's what it takes before you have enough content to start attracting people.
Well, yeah, people don't like joining empty forums. Postloop is good, it gets you more content. The more content you have, the more real users and posts you'll get. And of course, promote your site on other places, use social media, etc.
-Perhaps put a link/image in your signatures on other sites where you actively post at.
-do some post exchanges and the if some exchangers like your forum, they'll stick around and be active
-make a facebook page (if you have a fb account) and update it regularly to attract others
-do affiliate link exchanges with other active forums with the same niche as yours.
Hope these methods work out for you! good luck! :cheer:
Pandaa is right, this is part of the process. Having 100 posts and all of them being from postloop is not bad. You're use PL as it should be - as a content booster (or starter) to get your forum running. Hopefully most of those 100 posts are topics and not all replies to a handful of topics.
Get some more advertising. If you can afford it, paid advertising is great. If not, make use of free services on FP and other promotion forums. It may have been an oversight, but you didn't list that in your post of what you're doing. If you really aren't using promotion forums, you should (you're already on one).
Finally, keep at it and don't give up. It's a slow process and not for the faint of heart. It will take time but can work out if you stick with it. Good luck!
