Customizing SMF > Building Your Community and other Forum Advice

How to get more members on your forum?

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James---:
Hello everyone,

How do you get more members to join your forum and start conversations?
Do you have tips you want to add?

My tips are:

Create more content everyday
This helps to get more visibility on Google and thus get more traffic and some of them will become members.
Focus on SEO to get your pages in Google as good as they can be. Keep adding content everyday. The bigger
your forum, the higher the chance to get new members. Build an enormous forum.

Create guest posts on relevant blogs
Try to be in front of your community everyday. By writing good articles or creating something awesome
and place is on other blogs (with permission from the blog owner), you have a good chance to get in front
of your target audience.

Participate in the community
Be part of the conversation. Make yourself visible on other related websites, forums and blogs and participate.
Be sure that people know that you exist and some of them will come to your forum and register for a free account.
So respond to content, create video's, respond to video's, make friends with other webmasters, create content elsewhere,
create minisites and miniblogs, do everything to promote your forum and to be visible in the whole community.

Please add your tips below, so new forum admins can benefit from it.
There are many more ways to get more members. What's your advice?

Kindred:
rotfl... sorry, james, but your posts just make me laugh and shake my head....

Focus on seo? how? stack keywords into your posts? That'll get you blacklisted, eventually.

videos? really?   I am currently admin for a forum with several million posts, tens of thousands of members...
Neither I nor the owner are actually very active on the forum itself...  that's what the staff is for. :P
and we have no videos... or minisites... or blogs....
(well, actually, we just recently added the capability to have project blogs, but it didn't exist originally, and thus did not contribute to or detract from the existence of the site.


What you list *MAY* work... or it night not... it's all pretty much a crap shoot.

How about, instead... focus on good, relevant , NICHE content.
That will get you members and posts

James---:

--- Quote ---Focus on seo? how? stack keywords into your posts? That'll get you blacklisted, eventually.
--- End quote ---
- Making sure your topics have good titles
- Make sure your topics have good descriptions
- Search engine friendly URL's
- Internal links
- Create more and more content
- Making sure your content is promoted on social media
- Making sure your forum has correct headings
- etc.

Every website or forum owner has to help Google to index all the content on your forum in a correct way,
so that all your content is visible in Google in the best way possible. This can help to increase traffic and new members.

busterone:
The only item you listed that is true and relevant is
- Create more and more content  (although I want to add that it must be quality content that visitors will want to stay for, not just a bunch of stuffed empty posts   that have no real content)

Search engine friendly URLs are useless and actually cause problems. Google's search bots are quite capable on their own.

How do you make sure your topics have good title? That is impossible on a forum where your members start topics. If you go behind them and change their topic titles to "appear" more search engine friendly, you defeat the entire concept of a dynamic user input forum. You will most likely drive off your regular members by pulling that stunt. I would certainly leave myself.

Make sure your topics have good descriptions? See above.

You seriously need to read this topic all the way through-
Forum SEO is a myth
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=427913.msg3002288#msg3002288

stylusss:
Getting members is simple and easy.

1. Hide content that can only be viewed if you register. The hidden content, however, must be viewable prior to registration, huh? In other words, the thread must contain information, and the information that is valuable must be placed as an attachment, to which you can disallow guests from viewing. A guest will naturally sign-up and seek the thread once again to download the attachment - this significantly decreases bounce rate, and time spent online. Google spiders take this into consideration, leading to more pages being crawled onto Google, and other such search engine.

2. Want to make it a challenge? Once signed up, have a notice appear underneath the thread saying that you need to make one meaningful post before the attachment can be viewed. Create a group - Group 1, post count 1; Group 2, post count 2. Disallow post count 1 group from downloading attachments. So, once they make that "meaningful" post, they will enter into Group 2, and be allowed to download. Will this lead to spam posts, yes. But recall that your thread will increase in views and popularity. :)

Experience: Community started in 2010, currently 45000 members and 100000 posts.

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