How To Successfully Promote Your Forum

[Ilya]

Now I am not actually gonna copy+paste guides from other website, or post quick 101 tips guide like other members do.. :shrug:

This is a detailed tutorial on how to advertise and get members on your website written 100% by me. Typing this up right now, not 5 years ago 🙂


Requirements

1. Make sure you have either a .com, .net, or .org domain name. If you dont then it will be nearly impossible to get people to join your website and market it.

2. Have PAID host, dont use any of the free hosting companies which takes your website ages to load. Remember Google now also looks at how fast your website loads, to determine your website ranking.

3. Dont use a forum skin that was used by every other forum. My suggestion is do not use free forum skins at all. Either buy one or dont bother starting a forum which has the same forum skin as your competitors have, and every other forum.

Before Your Open Your Forum

1. Decide what type of forum you want to make, ask your self these questions:

- Is my forum content unique?
- Am i offering something that no other forum has?
- Am I good administrator? (seriously)

If you answer "yes" to all those questions then you are ready, and good chance of being successful.

2. Hire staff, if your forum is starting up all you need is 1 or 2 other staff members, if you open and start hiring, then people will just come to apply for the position, and if they dont get it they leave. Do not hire too much staff, because where user visits your forum they see out of 5 people they are the only person that is not staff, and a real member.

3. Get people hyped up about your forum. Go on different forums, and write something simple about it, and say "coming soon", spread the word, tell your friends, family everyone. Keep your website home page blank except with the words "Coming Soon". Everyone who you speak to on MSN/AIM/ETC. tell them something about your forum and tease them say "you have to wait to see it" if they ask for a preview.

4. Buy adspace, even though your forum is closed make sure to buy ad space, buy ONLY on sites that have higher or equal to google pagerank 1. The more PR1+ your site is linked to the higher your PR increases. I have seen a person having earned PR3 website while it was still in construction it was blank it said "Coming Soon" but had lots of backlinks. So when your forum opens up you already have PageRank and you will have credibility.

5. Get blogs to post about your forum and get people hyped up, and have blogs write some of your original content ideas and when your forum will open. Have the blog write another article first day your site opens. Make sure to open the day you stated.

6. Make sure your site looks good, it takes a user 5 seconds to develop an impression of your website, if you dont appeal to them in those 5 seconds you lost the customer. Make sure you dont have any indicators that your forum is not getting any hits or that it is old. Do not have "old" topic icons on old threads, and have all your forum categories say that which is a sign that it is dead.

Once Your Forum Is Open

1. Be active, you cant have a forum where the admin is never active or replies to pm's. Have all other staff active as well.

2. Post constant giveaways, or raffles, or contests. Referral Contests is overrated already, dont do them, let people have fun, not them work and get members.

3. Constantly innovate with new features.

4. If you are not getting enough members, then hire some freelancers or a group of freelancers, who post for 1 cent a post. Hire them for 1 week, and sign for Google Adwords for 1 week and when person clicks on your ad in google, then will see active members+unique content then they will sign up. Also have bogs post about your forum.

5. Listen to your members, dont do everything they want but listen and know whats going on in your forum who is making effort and who is not.

6. Do not hire friends over someone who works hard on your forum.

7. Dont sell yourself out to have advertisements all over the website unless you really need it.

8. If you offer unique enough services then create paid memberships.

--------------


I think I have added everything I wanted to say, Hope this helps, if I think of something to add Ill add more 🙂

 

[Marc]

Nice guide, Ilya.

I've already done everything on the list a long time ago. ( except the ones below in my quotes, 🙁 )

2. Have PAID host, dont use any of the free hosting companies which takes your website ages to load. Remember Google now also looks at how fast your website loads, to determine your website ranking.

There are some free hosts that are fast as normal paid hosts.

4. If you are not getting enough members, then hire some freelancers or a group of freelancers, who post for 1 cent a post. Hire them for 1 week, and sign for Google Adwords for 1 week and when person clicks on your ad in google, then will see active members+unique content then they will sign up. Also have bogs post about your forum.

I would suggest only doing this if the forum is really inactive and needs a lot more activity so that the other members can join in on posting, etc...

 

[Ilya]

adwords method can be applied to any situation adwords wont charge you alot if you know how to do it right

 

[JamesD31]

4. If you are not getting enough members, then hire some freelancers or a group of freelancers, who post for 1 cent a post. Hire them for 1 week, and sign for Google Adwords for 1 week and when person clicks on your ad in google, then will see active members+unique content then they will sign up. Also have bogs post about your forum.

Do you know of any good companies/forums/places/people who actually do quality work for posting like that? I have paid for two people already -both of which seemed legit yet took the money and ran after only 20 posts (one was for 100 and other for 200)...

 

[Ilya]

There is a lot of them, try to either go on scriptlance.com and post it there, or try to look on forums.

If you cant find any there are some companies that do posting for a bit higher prices but there legit. Search on google an you will find posts ranging from 5 cents to 25 cents a post.

Remember the 1 cent per post might not be such a good quality. So if you want to get high quality posts then you should hire for 5-10 cents a post.

If you need finding the 5-10 cents a post ones I have them in my bookmarks, pm me and Ill send you links 😉

 

[faviouz]

N/A

 

[Ilya]

no problem man 😀

 

[Teekay]

Nice guide. Added + rep.

 

[Ilya]

thanks you very much.

You can find more of these guides on my blog http://freeinspirations.com

 

[NBK*Twitch]

Now I am not actually gonna copy paste guides from other website, or post quick 101 tips guide like other members do.. :shrug:

This is a detailed tutorial on how to advertise and get members on your website written 100% by me. Typing this up right now, not 5 years ago 🙂


Requirements

1. Make sure you have either a .com, .net, or .org domain name. If you dont then it will be nearly impossible to get people to join your website and market it.

2. Have PAID host, dont use any of the free hosting companies which takes your website ages to load. Remember Google now also looks at how fast your website loads, to determine your website ranking.

3. Dont use a forum skin that was used by every other forum. My suggestion is do not use free forum skins at all. Either buy one or dont bother starting a forum which has the same forum skin as your competitors have, and every other forum.

Before Your Open Your Forum

1. Decide what type of forum you want to make, ask your self these questions:

- Is my forum content unique?
- Am i offering something that no other forum has?
- Am I good administrator? (seriously)

If you answer "yes" to all those questions then you are ready, and good chance of being successful.

2. Hire staff, if your forum is starting up all you need is 1 or 2 other staff members, if you open and start hiring, then people will just come to apply for the position, and if they dont get it they leave. Do not hire too much staff, because where user visits your forum they see out of 5 people they are the only person that is not staff, and a real member.

3. Get people hyped up about your forum. Go on different forums, and write something simple about it, and say "coming soon", spread the word, tell your friends, family everyone. Keep your website home page blank except with the words "Coming Soon". Everyone who you speak to on MSN/AIM/ETC. tell them something about your forum and tease them say "you have to wait to see it" if they ask for a preview.

4. Buy adspace, even though your forum is closed make sure to buy ad space, buy ONLY on sites that have higher or equal to google pagerank 1. The more PR1 your site is linked to the higher your PR increases. I have seen a person having earned PR3 website while it was still in construction it was blank it said "Coming Soon" but had lots of backlinks. So when your forum opens up you already have PageRank and you will have credibility.

5. Get blogs to post about your forum and get people hyped up, and have blogs write some of your original content ideas and when your forum will open. Have the blog write another article first day your site opens. Make sure to open the day you stated.

6. Make sure your site looks good, it takes a user 5 seconds to develop an impression of your website, if you dont appeal to them in those 5 seconds you lost the customer. Make sure you dont have any indicators that your forum is not getting any hits or that it is old. Do not have "old" topic icons on old threads, and have all your forum categories say that which is a sign that it is dead.

Once Your Forum Is Open

1. Be active, you cant have a forum where the admin is never active or replies to pm's. Have all other staff active as well.

2. Post constant giveaways, or raffles, or contests. Referral Contests is overrated already, dont do them, let people have fun, not them work and get members.

3. Constantly innovate with new features.

4. If you are not getting enough members, then hire some freelancers or a group of freelancers, who post for 1 cent a post. Hire them for 1 week, and sign for Google Adwords for 1 week and when person clicks on your ad in google, then will see active members unique content then they will sign up. Also have bogs post about your forum.

5. Listen to your members, dont do everything they want but listen and know whats going on in your forum who is making effort and who is not.

6. Do not hire friends over someone who works hard on your forum.

7. Dont sell yourself out to have advertisements all over the website unless you really need it.

8. If you offer unique enough services then create paid memberships.

--------------


I think I have added everything I wanted to say, Hope this helps, if I think of something to add Ill add more 🙂

Sorry if i sound rude,but your your requirement thing is bullcrap..

1. Make sure you have either a .com, .net, or .org domain name. If you dont then it will be nearly impossible to get people to join your website and market it.

Uhmm bullcrap.. I have seen many sites with .us,.co.uk,co.cc,and others do just fine. I have even seen subdomain places do better then domain places.

2. Have PAID host, dont use any of the free hosting companies which takes your website ages to load. Remember Google now also looks at how fast your website loads, to determine your website ranking.

Paid hosting helps nothing on the user said. Having a free host is not a bad thing. There are many great free hosts that are just as good or better then paid.

To name a few - trap17 365hosting and freehostia are all great.

3. Dont use a forum skin that was used by every other forum. My suggestion is do not use free forum skins at all. Either buy one or dont bother starting a forum which has the same forum skin as your competitors have, and every other forum.

Do you know why forums use the same skin over and over? Its cause it is a professinal level theme. Sure it can get annoying,but why use something not as good. It also does not need to be a paid for skin. Infact many forums like brawldomain use a free skin and do great.

 

[Loopy Legend]

Some of those tips are very usful, but do nto apply to every kind of forum, maybe stating which kind of forums would best benifit from each tip might be a good idea to help show what tip is good for what type of forum.

 

[Justin]

Requirements

1. Make sure you have either a .com, .net, or .org domain name. If you dont then it will be nearly impossible to get people to join your website and market it.

2. Have PAID host, dont use any of the free hosting companies which takes your website ages to load. Remember Google now also looks at how fast your website loads, to determine your website ranking.

1. That is not neccesary. .us domain .mebo .co.uk and all of those work. Also, I have seen a site get big off a co.cc he paid for 8 years. Don't be fooled.

2. I get hosting for free from my boss, with unlimited everything. You have really stereotyped a large number of excellent free hosts.

 

[David]

I agree with THT on those above points.

There is a UK business forum with a .co.uk and it is doing much better than most of it's niche.

Google looks into how fast your site loads, as well as the other 200+ factors. Page content is much more important to search engines than site speed. Site speed is merely a user factor, so that makes your point invalid. There is no such thing as free hosting. Someone's got to pay up eventually, and it is slower because it is more popular. Like THT says, I also get free hosting but it's relatively fast.