Building and Promoting a New Forum

By admin • April 15th, 2009

Forum sites are considered one of the more difficult types of sites to build up to become successful. Not only do you have to create and promote the site as you would any site, but you need to convince users to signup and actually start posting. This process is made somewhat easier if you are attaching a forum to an already existing site, but if you are creating a fresh forum based site from scratch, it can be quite a challenge.

No Content

One of the big problems I see when going to new forum sites, or the majority of forums in general actually, is that there aren’t any users or even content on the site. Typically the forum owner has setup multiple forum sections, sometimes far too many forum sections, posted a welcome message, and thats about it. There tend to be a few more posts scattered here and there from months earlier where someone has asked a question and no one ever replied and thats all. When I see a forum like that I do what everyone else does, go someplace else. Why would I take the time to register and sign up at a dead forum where no one will talk to me or answer any of my questions? Many forum owners expect that just setting up a forum and doing some configuration means that users will automatically start using it. Unfortunately thats not the case.

Talk to Yourself

The trick is, creating fake users and talking to yourself. When I started my last forum, I created about 10 different user accounts. I then proceeded to spend a week logging into the various accounts and talking with myself, creating threads, and answering my own questions. I also enlisted my wife and a couple of family members to create accounts and just post as much as they could. They didn’t really know anything about the subject, which happened to be science fiction, but at least they were able to welcome the new members coming in, make slightly off topic threads concerning Happy Potter etc.. They were really a big help.

What happened? As real people started browsing to the site, they saw a small, but very active forum. Instead of just jumping away immediately, they browsed around and read through some of the threads, occasionally one of them would signup themselves and start posting. Over the course of a few weeks, the real users began talking to each other and I was able to phase out logging in with the fake accounts. The forum was now self sufficient, generating it’s own content, and attacting new users on it’s own.

Buying Posts

There are services out there that actually do paid forum posting for you. Generally you pay them for a certain amount of posts, and they have paid employees go to your forum, setup accounts, and start posting. I have used this method a couple of times in the past, but no longer do it. Although the posts were of decent quality, most of the time you could tell the posters really didn’t know anything about the subject matter, and the posts in general just have a real “me too” type of vibe to them. What I paid 50 dollars for I could have just as easily spend some more time posting and done myself. I could have then taken that 50 dollars and pushed some traffic to the forum with a permanent link on someone’s site, or by buying some PPC ads. Still, it is a viable option and can be very helpful.

Posting Elsewhere

One of the best methods I have found to bring traffic to a forum is by going to other forums with a similar subject and becoming an active member of their community. I don’t really advertise my forum outright, but I do put my link in my signature. Also when appropriate I may stick a link here and there on their site pointing to a picture or something on mine. Outright advertising at a competitors site will most likely get you banned from that site, so tread carefully with this.

Forums are certainly one of the more difficult sites to get up and running successfully. However if your not afraid of investing a little time and hard work into it, it can be done. Good luck!