Forum Promotion Techniques - Suggestions?

[yeppers]

Hi all,

Recently i launched a free forum hosting service, and in the mix i've decided to start a bunch of forums on exact google keywords that do not yet have decent forums ranking highly in search engines. (These forums have their own domains, not affiliated with the free forum hosting service)

My questions to you successful forum owners:

• How do you get people visiting your forum in the first place? (No SEO related info please)
• How do you get people registering?
• How do you get people posting?

I'm not just interested in free options either, wanting to explore any options available. I'm not asking how i drive traffic to a website, but how to really create a community itself, and keep that community talking.

Just wondering peoples suggestions. Your answers will be greatly appreciated, and not just by me i'm sure.

-Rhett

 

[iain123]

last time i did a forum i used an auto posting script to pull content
plenty of fake accounts used by the script and timed posting these posts then got traffic and actually people started commenting on them after a while i stopped the forum due to mass spamming but while it was running it went ok.
all i can remember was it was run on phbb forum script and it was a auto poster generator of some kind i do remember though "fg"
was a while back

update
google "instadigi"
never used it but i did a search trying to find what i used and came up blank
hope this helps

 

[aditd]

Just like this. You advertise about the site and you wait and you wait. People will register in time.
My opinion: not quite a good business. ( by this I mean making money out of it )

 

[Peetr]

If the forum brings together groups of people that’ve previously been disparate it should grow naturally. For instance I know someone that created a forum for professionals in the prop industry not long ago – something that’d never been done before. It meant visitors of themselves had things to share with each other.

 

[yeppers]

Good point Peetr,

How about competition though, launching a forum with competition is hard to endure through.

 

[ExquisiteMedia]

Use your competition for education. Look at what brings/keeps people at their forum and use that as a starting point for how you can do better than them. Competition is hard if you don't think outside of the box. Many people ignore their competition and this really limits the breadth of their knowledge in that particular niche.

 

[RazorNF]

You should target a niche which isn't already served by more established forums, then it will be a little easier. Starting something from scratch covering a subject already cornered by popular forums isn't worth it.

Don't go the autoposting scrape route.

Pick categories that you actually know something about, whether it be your occupation, your hobbies, your car, etc. If you do this, then chances are you have friends and colleagues with similar interests and can help you generate real discussion/content.