When starting a forum.. you do it alone?

[vans]

Do people usually start a forum with actually 0 users in it? Only the webmaster?
How would you gather some volunteers who actually love forums (of course, the thematic of the forum should be attractive for these users) to help you start off?

Promotional google ads / facebook ads / twitter ads are cool. Also presenting your project in websites such as fp, and maybe other sites could bring you traffic too.
But, to begin with the forum, before doing all that process... and if you do NOT have known people or close friends who helps you off at the beginning... how do you handle that?

Best regards!

 

[Bryn]

The minute I started my first forum, I just pasted its link on my now-defunct YouTube channel and got some members already. Helps that I had a good amount of subscribers back then too.

 

[vans]

The minute I started my first forum, I just pasted its link on my now-defunct YouTube channel and got some members already. Helps that I had a good amount of subscribers back then too.

Oh that was good.
I got a question to you though: would it be clever to find some "small" youtubers, or twitchers who are actually streaming/making videos and their community is low-medium, to let them know that I will start off a forum project based on esports, and that I might give them a section or some place to chat with themselves? It is something that came in my mind some time ago, and that even though its hard to find a person who actually likes the idea, if someone is found, that would bring some community members that will at least talk about something related to esports (although they depend on the actual youtuber)

thank you 🙂

 

[Bryn]

If you want to, but keep in mind that I made my first forum during YouTube's much earlier days, which was somewhere in 2008. Things like streaming and all that didn't exist then.

 

[vans]

If you want to, but keep in mind that I made my first forum during YouTube's much earlier days, which was somewhere in 2008. Things like streaming and all that didn't exist then.

Yeah I know. If anything, now things are better because there are more streamers as it is more popular in the social media 🙂
Thanks though.

 

[Jerlene]

I always start it on my own but I'll get members by running contests, advertising on social media and forums, doing post exchanges, etc.

 

[vans]

I always start it on my own but I'll get members by running contests, advertising on social media and forums, doing post exchanges, etc.

Thanks. That's what I am going to do right now; thankfully I got already one guy who PM'ed me because he is interested. But still the forum is not yet launched, as it should take a little bit more to fix few bugs 🙂. But pretty much that's it. Firstly doing post exchanges to get some activity, and meanwhile advertising on social media (starting for Facebook, and not sure if google ADS. Gotta ask about Google because I am not familiar with it) and on forums. After that, I'd run contests to attract more users, and make some incentive to keep current users.

Still I know it's easy to talk about it, but hard to do it.

 

[Jerlene]

I always start it on my own but I'll get members by running contests, advertising on social media and forums, doing post exchanges, etc.

Thanks. That's what I am going to do right now; thankfully I got already one guy who PM'ed me because he is interested. But still the forum is not yet launched, as it should take a little bit more to fix few bugs 🙂. But pretty much that's it. Firstly doing post exchanges to get some activity, and meanwhile advertising on social media (starting for Facebook, and not sure if google ADS. Gotta ask about Google because I am not familiar with it) and on forums. After that, I'd run contests to attract more users, and make some incentive to keep current users.

Still I know it's easy to talk about it, but hard to do it.

I saw that you were doing monthly contests. Smart, but I hope you don't spend more than you make.

 

[vans]

Well, forum is not yet open. I do not really plan to get an income, just to be funny and make it usefull.
As of now, money wouldnt be a problem. And yep id spend more than i get, but hopefully not much 🙂

 

[Jerlene]

Good luck! I forgot the link. Can you drop it here? I want to check it out. 🙂

 

[vans]

Good luck! I forgot the link. Can you drop it here? I want to check it out. 🙂

The forum is still not opened. It will be an Esports forum, but not limited to it; I guess that once I open it, it will be in beta version, in which I will have just a pair of categories (forums) to catch up a little bit.
If you want, once I open the beta (which will most likely be soon) I can drop you a PM. However, I will open a thread explaining everything in forumpromotion.

Thanks for your interest though, it's always good to know people who might be interest in help, and it can be reciprocal (not sure if this word even exist lol).

Best regards Jerlene!

 

[daica85]

I always do it myself and yes alone

 

[johnthan]

I do it all myself. With a few posts and invite others to join the forum for discussions and information.

 

[bullish]

When you start a forum it's actually ideal to do it all by yourself. What do you need volunteers for with less than 100 active members? You should be hiring devs to build what you need and you can do all the other management yourself.

 

[lucycarter]

I prefer doing it alone. If required i hire a freelancer developer to build something special for my forum but otherwise i just invite people to my for discussion. And yes i agree with you using facebook ads, google ads or twitter goods are good for this promotional purpose.

 

[JoelR]

I'm going to answer the second part of the OP"s question with a guest article I wrote for Invision Community: https://invisioncommunity.com/news/community-management/how-to-build-an-audience-with-chip-r1162/

It's very, very hard to build a brand new community without an existing audience. You need to spend the time to invest in building an audience pre-launch.

Whenever I hear a new webmaster ask about SEO or forum promotion tactics like ads, those are the admins most likely to fail. Why? Because they're looking for a quick shortcut. They think they can spend all the money in the world to promote and buy their audience, but they don't do the hard work of offering compelling content or building out their audience -- which is what will ultimately make users repeatedly visit.

 

[Katrina]

When I requested that Romanos create a forum for me I let him do his thing with his team and then jumped in to help when needed. Not everyone has the same strengths and sometimes it takes a good team of people who use their skills to do what will benefit the site and fine tune it. They are also the ones who get the threads and posts started but sometimes just to see what happens when using modifications to the site.

I don't know enough about software, hosting, etc to ever start a new forum on my own and I think we did a pretty good job with Christianity Haven.