Forums are brilliant, have made Internet history, but with no traffic to your forum; it will rapidly become just that...history.
Every single user wants to join large forums for sharing and exchanging ideas and leave questions for other users to answer.
Lots of people, sharing interests, join the same communities and many Internet marketers capitalize on these forums because they can benefit just by joining them.
When you start your own forum, the possibility of having a lot of user interaction is big. You have spent months working on it, expected some traffic, but the problem is; there is no traffic at all.
Now you wonder; what went wrong?
No members...you have checked. No one even signed to join your forum.
So how can you generate traffic to your forum?
First of all, you will want to make the forum looks inviting and welcoming. This can be done by implementing a clean, simple, warm and interesting theme. Use soft colors like orange, green and blue or even a light gray or white.
Always start with a smaller forum. The fewer categories, the easier it is to fill the forum. Apply the ones that will attract the user's interests. Four or five subjects will be easy to manage and you do not need many members or posts to make it seem active and busy.
Find two or three active and committed members who know the subject in the forum very well. These two or three dedicated members will make your forum look busy and others will join. You will of course be very active and familiar with the subject of your forum as well. Make at least five posts per day (from different people).
After a couple of weeks you can even promote the most active member to a moderator. Although a moderator might not yet be needed (until you have at least 60 - 80 members) it will encourage the moderator to be more active.
Another method, which may sound crazy, but will definitely increase the traffic; make fake users with different names and different details. Build threads about subjects that are related to your site. Then log on as the other fake user and reply to the post.
Now when someone drops in to your site, they will be convinced that there is actually a community in your site and the user will start to register and post. Be aware of that you need to keep on track with their threads and posts so you will be able to reply with both your real and fake accounts which you have created.
Anyway...the appearance of a large number of links to related content on your forum can help it be found by the Google bot. Also remember to put a link to your forum in your profile on online sites and in your Twitter account.
These are some efficient ways for starting a forum, but of course there are many more tips and ideas about how to launch and maintain. There is way more to know and obviously many other things you can try....here are a few more thoughts you can apply and which I hope will work for you:
1. Be active in other forums and add value to them. People will click your signature. 2. Offer incentives to users who do actively participate in your forum. 3. Add a competition. People are willing to do a lot for 10$. 4. Don't use admin as username or a fancy picture. Use a real picture and your name. 5. Your community should really like hanging out at your spot so don't be too strict with guidelines and rules. 6. Give the project a couple of years to develop.
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