Best ways to promote?

[KahneFan]

What have you found to be the best ways to promote your forum? I emphasize "you found", because we all know many ways to advertise, but I'm looking at what you may have done that works best for you.

Have you done something that after the action you've had a stream of registrations?

[mrbolsonator]

I am a newbie at promotion too and am looking for more ways to cheaply advertise.

I found one FREE way about a month ago, using facebook.

So what you do is make a page with your forum on it, and then add this application to it

http://www.facebook.com/s.php?ref=search&init=q&q=The+Visa+Business+Network&sid=3887457ee242edd0caf2c6d985ac91da#/apps/application.php?id=24249628048&ref=s

It will send you $100 of facebook advertisement credits to use. I scored 20 new members on my facebook page, (you can use the ads to go tdirectly to your site too), and I got 10 new members for my site. I set my price around 30-50 cents per click and it did very well. Now if you are willing to spend money, use google adwords and for about 5-20 cents per click, you can get an overwhelming audience.

Hope that helps!

[~kev~]

Videos on youtube are my primary form of advertising.  When I opened my sons forum, I started applying the same thing to his site.

We make our own videos, use royalty free music, put the website address in the video an in the video description.

For my forum, youtube is the 4th high referring site, right behind yahoo.

For my sons forum, youtube is about the 8th highest referring site.

[Jade Elizabeth]

I use forum and email signatures... everyone who gets a message from me gets my linkage

Also, free forum directories work too

My original userbase came from god knows where .

[arty5]

Facebook and Twitter is what i use.

[Ensiferous]

I did something radical. I went and made an actual website with content and information so that I wasn't just yet another silly forum that's just as good as all the other forums. Then I integrated the website registration with the forum registration so that when they created an account for the site it would also work on the forum, at that point the barrier to post was eliminated and I could start promoting the forum for free on my own site all while people linked my site because I had good content there. An easy few thousand members a day with some 3-4 thousand posts as well.

There's no doubt this is *the* way to start a forum, problem for most people is they either haven't got the skills to do it or they have no ambition outside of "I want a forum!"

[arty5]

http://www.bbtn.us/forum/ is that yours lol alot of people have silly forums but they also work 

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[ishy]

There's no doubt this is *the* way to start a forum, problem for most people is they either haven't got the skills to do it or they have no ambition outside of "I want a forum!"

This isn't necessarily true; it has a great deal to do with what kind of genre you've created. A website isn't an automatic hit generator.

It also depends on what kind of people you are attracting.  Those who are interested in the community aspect might not pay any attention to your website.

Personally, I'd rather have 10 fun, active members than 100 spammy or nonposting members.  I also think that sites whose sole purpose is just to count members end up either filled with spam, drama, trolls, or no interesting content.

My advice: Make a site about something you love, and people will come.

[arty5]

Pretty good reply because its so true, but i like my idea even though its far fetched and a pretty big thing to alcomplish but i really need to sit down and start posting more original informative content and tutorials for ever subject to attract more and find they key "i like that so i will join"

[Ensiferous]

a lot of people have silly forums but they also work 

I can quite honestly say What The Hell to this one. You took a link in my signature to a *hosting* site and randomly attached /forum/ to the URL? There is no forum there, nor is there going to be. In fact, if you actually had gone to the site of mine with a forum then it still wouldn't have been at that URL. Your attempt at ridicule really just makes you look stupid and draws into doubt your ability to reason properly. Since you probably also doubt my statement, here's how effective it actually can be: http://gyazo.com/8d42ca8668014f76ccaf5883632b556e.png

This isn't necessarily true; it has a great deal to do with what kind of genre you've created. A website isn't an automatic hit generator.

Indeed it's not. Maybe my previous post wasn't very clear or maybe you just read what you wanted to, but I at no point said it was an automatic hit generator.

What I actually said was that there are a ton of forums, if that is all you is then what makes you better than the rest? You have a pretty theme? Contrary to what many people like to delude themselves with the theme actually doesn't make that huge of a difference. As you can see from the above screenshot I'm using the default 2.0 theme and it's gone quite well.

If you do decide to be a forum-only service then you either need to go very niche to hit something no one has ever done before, (which gets more and more unlikely) or you need to spend a ton of time and/or money getting people on your forum, otherwise you're doomed to a small community which will eventually fizzle out.

I argued that having a website made promoting your service easier, you're suddenly no longer confined to only a forum which gives you a lot of flexibility in attracting users and building a service or information page which will attract users far better. The upside is then that you actually have an actual website which is far easier to monetize than a forum!

It also depends on what kind of people you are attracting.  Those who are interested in the community aspect might not pay any attention to your website.

Now you're boxing people and I'm pretty sure you have no supporting evidence either. People use the Internet for two things, information and entertainment. A forum can cover both, so saying that people who are interested in a community aren't interested in a related website is untrue. I know you used "might not" but if you literally meant "might" then I could just as easily have countered with "People who are interested in the community aspect only might be nazis." and it would make equally little sense as a logical argument.

Personally, I'd rather have 10 fun, active members than 100 spammy or nonposting members.  I also think that sites whose sole purpose is just to count members end up either filled with spam, drama, trolls, or no interesting content.

This is a logical fallacy. You're assuming that just because there are more members the quality of their posts are going to be reduced. Obviously this is an unfair assumption to make as it has no basis in reality.

I can understand your mentality for non-posting members, however this is only an issue if your main site exists solely to funnel members into the forum. I actually care about my main site. My ads earn me about 45% of the total revenue, I have about 40 million ad impression per month, about 2.5 million of theme from the forum. The forum ads usually pay about 85% of what the site ones do due to the format used. I honestly cannot be bothered to work out how many percentage of my revenue comes from the forum, but it's not overly much, a shot from the hip would be about 6%. You may not care about revenue from your site but really just want a forum, and that's fair enough, I still argue that having had an actual site to funnel traffic from has done wonders for my forum, and yes I have non-posters, but they do no harm, in fact, they don't do much at all, hardly anything really!

My advice: Make a site about something you love, and people will come.

This is somewhat true, though I feel it needs to be a bit more specific. You cannot make a site about something you love and then expect traffic and members to just instantly appear, it will still take hard work and lots of time. Caring about the subject makes you much more motivated to work on it and as such you are more likely to succeed. So we agree a bit.

Apologies for any glaring spelling errors, run-on-sentences or unclear statements, I hit preview and saw the massive wall of text and the task of reviewing it for errors seemed too daunting at this hour.

[rd]

You have a pretty theme? Contrary to what many people like to delude themselves with the theme actually doesn't make that huge of a difference.

+1

My forum had 2,000 members with lots of post in about 6 months and I was using SMF 1.x series with Core theme. No one and I mean no one complained. Face it, from my POV users don't care about theme, this forum is a good example.

When I first started my forum, I didn't have any money nor much experience, I used a friends shared hosting to launch my forum with a subdomain (even today I don't have a full domain, I still use a sub). I got some of my friends to start posting, it was easier for us because my forum was more of a index site with a listing of stories and reviews. I've read a lot (heck, even read over 400,000 words in one night) just so I could review the story the next day and keep my members happy with content.

All I'm saying is that you have to be dedicated. You gotta reach out and push yourself to always adding content... Never stop even in the quite days, where no one seems to be around.

I might not be getting as much money as Ensiferous but the forum earns me a double digit from donations, no ads currently and none planned.

I also have none posters, do I delete them? Of course not! They are there, I can see them signed on in times and browsing the forum and giving it a 10,000+ pageview a day. I try to reach out to them and so far I've seen some activity from people who have registered last year and started posting now.

There is no short cuts to building a community, of course you can go on a paid advertising spree, general advertising, spamming, seo, etc. but these won't help you much if you don't have CONTENT. Visitors won't stay on your site unless you give them a reason to stay.

- Dedication
- Unique content
- Frequent content


The number 1 is dedication, without it I wouldn't have what I have today with 3,000+ members

[arty5]

content is my big issue lol i been searching for new things to bring up like movie in development to Facebook issue's i made a test board for rss feeds not to steal content but to build my forum im also only testing it out to see if it makes a difference and added a mmorpg game Phoas seeing it is a free script and also has a community like smf, I have started a new Facebook account called world newz which i will try to get friends all over the place to become a friend with that account to publish latest topics in like families/ health ect, and i been trying to catch some on the spot stories so i can write articles about them.

[arty5]

Banks wont give you a loan or credit card otherwise lol nah helps people see what you run i guess lol aka ur forum

[CHI]

I just invited my friends, that's all.