Creating a Forum Part 4 – Getting Members

This is the forth part of the creating a forum series. Today we will be focusing in one of hardest parts of building a forum: getting members!!!

Most forums will fail if they can’t manage to attract new and active members. So one of the first things a webmaster needs to start thinking is how they will bring new members?

First Step: Create Content!

You have just configured your forum, things look real nice, but it is all very empty…

This is where you need to start your posting Frenzy! That’s right. You will need to create relevant and decent topics so that new visitors can see that your forum actually has something to show…. Don’t be lazy… I promise you it is fun. Just remember this little tip:

Don’t leave any board empty. Create content on each board your forum has. Users don’t like to see empty boards.

After that, you will have a few dozens of new topics, but there is no one responding to them. There are no discussions going on, there is no user interactivity!

What can you do to fix this? You have 4 choices:

1. Wait for new members, and pray they will post in your lonely topics (bad ideia).
2. Get Evil, create fake members and start talking to your self… hum. i mean… You create replies on your topics using different members to fake some discussions and activity in your forum. This is a valid way to increase your forum’s activity, making it a bit more appealing for visitors to signup. But in my opinion… Do it only if you are “desperate”.
3. Gather a group of friends: This is by far my favourite method. It worked well for me. I always nagged invited a close group of friends to take part on my forum. This way, the forum had a group of active members, creating dozens of new topics and replies in just a few days
4. Pay freelancers to post on your forum: you can hire someone to become a member of your forum. You can find them in forums such as Digital Point. Usually they charge by sets of posts and topics. For example: You pay $20 and you will get 50 new posts including topics and replies.

Second Step: Bring Traffic to your forum!

Most of you know how to drive traffic to your blogs, so the concept to bring visitors to forums is basically the same.

If you have a good budget you may consider creating a few targeted PPC campaigns. If not then you do what everybody else does:

1. Comment on blogs;
2. Register for several forums, create a signature, advertising your forum and be active;
3. Create a topic about your forum on the Advertising board, if the forum you are visiting has one. But to do this and get some credibility, build your post number first. It won’t look nice when someone looks at your post count and sees a lonely 1, administrators (like me) won’t like that, and will simply delete the topic;
4. Trade advertising with other sites;
5. Add your forum to directories;

If you are “lucky” like i was, you can ditch all these steps and wait for google to drive you traffic (and new members) to your forum, I did some tweakings that made my forum get around 200 new members each month. But, my friends, this is an issue for one of the following posts. Stay tuned