Which way should I do this? And one other question.

[Strummer21]

I have my forum up and have had a few people make some posts and I am ready to release it to my target audience.  I have about 120 contacts that I want to invite to my community (it's a small business niche so my forum will be small).  My question is, do you think I should invite them (via email) in smaller groups of 30 or so at a time seperated by a week so that the first set can start posting and generate some content before the next group and so on?  I am afarid if I send it to all 120, they may see only a few posts and leave and not return.  Also, does anyone have an example of an invitation to join a community?  I would be grateful if you could share what you sent out in the beginning.  Thank you for your help.

[skelzer]

Ditto... looking for the exact same details. Any insight would be great, thanks.
-s

[WisePagan]

Although I am BRAND NEW to creating forums... still trying to figure this all out... I am not so new to marketing psych.

Some things to keep in mind:

The more specific your subject the more attention you must pay to to your targets and what they are telling YOU.

Sending out mass emails hardly ever produces the results you are looking for... hardly EVER. That's not to say it shouldn't be done though.
My advice: Create a survey on surveymonkey.com [nofollow] (free for limited features) and ask people in your target exactly what they want to see in your forum (without revealing too many of your suprises).

Ask yourself: what am I going to do to encourage my contacts to visit, register and post? (I'm still figuring this out myself) From what I understand, you will need to A) with-hold something from them that they can ONLY get by joining your forum and B) be willing to spend 3 times more of your own energy and time than what you expect your participants to do.

The rest is up in the air for me... I don't know whether you should blow up all your contacts in one announcement or if you should do that gradual thing... I'm just thinking that you may get disappointed when you send out 30 emails and get only 1 post...