Please, tell me how to gain members. I've seen a lot of other forums with a high amount of members, I don't know how they do it. I can't afford to pay for anything currently, so please don't even suggest anything I'd have to pay for. Thanks. 🙂
Getting a very active forum just doesn't happen, there is no instant secret. It will take alot of work, loads of advertising, getting your friends involved and other tricks. If you keep at it and dont give up, then you can have a nice big active forum.
Well its hard to get a good forum going with no budget for a domain name/hosting. But its still very possible. Just takes some patience and persistence.
Thank you for the tips. 🙂 I'm constantly inviting my friends (they're going to hate me heh) and advertising wherever I can. Once people join, how could I encourage activity?
To start getting more visitors i recommend doing affiliate exchanges here on FP if you haven't done so already. There you can have your image on another forums forum.
As for activitiy, contests are good, you yourself making lots of posts are good. If you notice activity dying, it is good to maybe make some changes to your forum, and send a mass pm telling everybody of the changes, that might remind people if they have forgotten about your forum.
I see that your forum looks empty. There's not too many people who would be willing to join your forums. Start off by making topics, then get a few post exchanges (I'd get at least 25 topics before you even start a post exchange). That's when you do real promotion, outside this forum, and into the real world. The theme you have isn't too bad. Perhaps "jazz up" your forum descriptions (and the names for that matter). "Talk about all the Gaming Consoles here!" sounds boring, to be quite frank with you.
It takes lots of time and effort to run a good forum. Even then, that isn't always enough. Good luck, and I hope my advice helps.
First of all be serious about it, get a domain. Act as if u are an admin of something big, be very active on ur forum urself, get a lot of members by paying them and ask them to post a lot and do a lot of seo to get tonz of traffic at that moment. try to get traffic when you have ur forum very active and bang! Here you go!
Honestly, General Chat forum isn't new. There's nothing unique about General Chat forum. So it would be hard. I would suggest promoting more and changing the theme. It takes time to gain members.
Ah, okay thanks. 🙂 I'm actually looking into Wordpress now because I have multiple uses for it. 😀
Dr Juana,
Thank you for the feedback, I have no plans to stop advertising. 😀 And, we actually offer more themes than what is shown. We have a plugin that allows you to change your theme. After scrolling down, it should be in the bottom right corner of your web page, feel free to make use of those themes. 🙂
Not one of the best domains, most users would say get a TLD. Your theme just doesn't give me the touches it needs, it is too bright and to be honest ugly. Not having a banner effects your forum and I reccomend getting one along with a slogan. At first I thought your forum was revolved around jewellery which I thought was odd when I found it was basically a general chat community. Theres too many off them and focus it around a main source of discussion but good luck.
I would also suggest creating a few accounts yourself and using those to post in your forum. Even if you use several of your own posts to respond to yourself it makes it look like people are using the forum and posting.
It sounds like a pain to do and time consuming, but if you really want to make a go of the forum then these are the sort of things you'll need to do. After a while you may find that you don't need to post with all your accounts so much if people start visiting more.
But it is going to take a lot of time and patience before you start seeing a lot of activity on your site. I'm in the same situation right now. 🙂
Ok, Clarkey I don't know who would be stupid enough to make accounts and post on them, I would call that cheating just to make your forum look interesting, also if you do that to your site I won't join because perhaps the majority of members are you and that just put me off your site all in one, I really do not recommend doing what Clarkey mentioned.
