How to get members for your forum

[Footzilla]

How to get members for your forum

1.Is your forum about fish? Then post some great fish articles! Write your own or if your gonna use other peoples make sure the first thing you post is the source of the article as in the url, don’t ever take from people with out giving them a link, a link is gold to webmasters and is the only reason why they would allow you to post their content on your forum.

WHEN YOU MAKE GOOD THREADS THIS WILL NOT ONLY GIVE PEOPLE SOMETHING TO READ BUT WILL GIVE SEARCH ENGINE SPIDERS CONTENT TO SLURP UP AND DISPLAY IN THEIR SEARCH RESULTS.

Try making a Frequently Asked Questions(F.A.Q.) about your topic and stickying or pinning the thread. This can be an awesome resource your can provide first time visitors right off the bat.

Post every youtube video related to your topic you can find, make your own youtube videos then put a link to your forum in the vid and in the video description. Once you get some members you can have contests where members will make videos, make sure part of the rules are they have to include your url in the videos. Youtube can be a great marketing tool for any website, don’t forget that.

Whenever you write up a nice post/article/FAQ or if you make a vid or whatever else you do to add content you can use social bookmarking like Digg.com or stumbleupon.com to share it with the world. Don’t do this with other peoples content obviously only your own. You can Digg or Stumble good quality threads just like a blog post, just make sure theres lots of good content in whatever your sharing. Make sure you don’t overdo it or you will get banned from Digg like what happened to me. I Dug too many crappy short threads with short first posts.

Remember, no content=no visitors

You can even set up an rss feed to make posts in a certain part of the forum everytime it updates. You may even want to use a bunch of rss feeds to not only post in a certain forum but to show up on your main portal page using products like vbadvanced(for vbulletin). This can make your mainpage into a news resource.
The great thing about having a blog or any other non forum site is that the traffic you already have will filter into your forum and become members. Instead of using a portal script like vbulletin you might even want to use a blog as your mainpage. For example if I was to add a forum to this site I would have the url be

howtoflow.com/forum

Ok we established the importance of content, now remember every forum member you get is someone who will possibly add lots and lots of content to your forum, a great reason to be nice to everyone who visits. Actually another thing you should remember is never under any circumstances be an asshole to anyone, you will just drive people away with all the negativety. I had to learn this the hard way and I still have trouble keeping my mouth shut alot of the time. Just remember that theres never any pride on the line over the internet, don’t let anyone piss your off or have any sort of control over your emotions.

This sorta leads into my next major recommendation to anyone starting a brand new forum or anyone who’s having trouble getting members.

2. Be a bunch of people!

People want to join a forum with activity, noone wants to join a dead community and if they do join they most likely will not come back.

The thing is though if you sign up yourself under alot of different names and post this content under different names it will make your forum look 100% more active for ever username you sign up as. I know this sounds stupid but ask yourself what will look better. A forum with just one member or a forum with 5 members who post new content regularly? Create some unique characters or “gimmicks” as forumers refer to them as and try to make them as funny/entertaining as possible. If your gonna fight with someone online fight with yourself lol. This is your chance to be creative and show off some writing skills.

3.Get posters by any means necessary.

This means beg people to sign up, beg them to stay. Get a reputation at another forum and put a link in your sig(do not do this if the forum owner isnt ok with it, its unethical, usually they don’t care though). Get your friends from real life to come and make some posts. Offer free downloads to anyone who signs up. Your gonna have to give people a reason to come back, sometimes all you need is an active community to get people to come back but when you are first starting you might want to think of ways you can provide people with something they WANT like unique content or downloads or even just entertainment. Put together some contests, send emails to non active members telling them to comeback, do what you gotta do and use your head. If it applies to your nich you might even want to setup a personals section where people can find mates who are into the same stuff they are.

You may want to make a Myspace or Face book page specifically for your forum. You can search for people who you might think will be interested in your topic and invite them as friends. Be carefull with that though you don’t want Tom to think your spamming people, I heard hes a badass.

4.Search Engine Optimization(SEO).

Yes I know this is a scary and confusing word for alot of people but without it you might as well forget everything I already told you and give up on starting your own forum altogether(never give up). First you need to learn the basics of SEO such as

Title Tage

Meta Tags

Keywords in your domain

Backlinks

Trust

Domain Age

Anyways you get the idea, I’m gonna cover more forum specific SEO stuff so please learn about this stuff first using google. Search for stuff like “Basic website SEO”, “Search Engine Optimization Techniques”,”How To Rank High With Search Engines”

Use the links I post at the bottom of this article, The forums I will be mentioning are places where I have learned more about SEO(search engine optimization) than anywhere else.

Anyways for those “experts” out there I will move onto the more forum specific stuff.

-Make your pages as unique as possible, Remember every thread is also a page that search engines see. Get rid of useless junk in your forum titles such as “powered by vbulletin” anything else besides the thread title will just make those threads less “relevent” to search engines. What this means is if someone searches for “how to make cheese” then they will be more likely to see your page high up on the search engine results page if your thread is titled

i forgot the link from which i got thismfg:

[Shadab]

Thread moved from the 'Web Development' forum to this dedicated section of Forum Administration and Management.
Btw, i think the original article is posted here : How to get members for your forum

Anyway, thanks for posting.

[mrrsx2006]

Great ideas. I think having good content is one of the most important things to do. Once the content is there then one should worry about getting more traffic.

[pojr]

Thanks. I'm probably going to make a bunch of accounts and start topics with them all. That will get me some members.

[lailai]

Great tips, I am already using some of your tips!

[ank88]

I dont have much time for reading such huge topics. as I am always busy with my broadband in downloading softwares and games for mobiles.
Please post some mini ones which are best


Ankit

[Swastik]

Good article Jasar!

Nice tips on there.

[bluehannah]

Informative article you have there. To populate your forum fast, getting referrals is effective or having an affiliate program. Also doing contests is the most popular one.

[naughty]

thanks for the tips would try them

[Shadab]

Originally Posted by naughty

thanks for the tips would try them

Glad you found them useful.

Btw, welcome to GeekPoint.