Marketing a newly launched forum can be difficult because you might get into a chicken egg situation about your forum.
Forums are a place for users to ask questions, answer and discus an issue or a trending topic that is less discussed elsewhere. Basically forum members will fall into two categories, there is a third category but those are the readers or website visitors through search engines looking for information. But at first you need to be concerned about the two important types of users. They are the one that are looking for a solution and those who are interested in discussion by answering and asking even more.
Many visitors looking for a solution would tend to join the forum if the forum is active with active topics and replies. If your forum is new then you have almost negligible topics and replies.
There comes the main problem. If your forum has no activity then no new member would want to spend time registering and asking a question because they know they would not get any replies. And, if your forum has no new topics started then how can one even answer those? Hence your website never gets any genuine member to join and take an active part in a forum.
Spamming and Zombie Users haunting a new forum
When you start a new forum and when it starts getting some crawler activity then you might find some users getting registered on to your forums. These users are bots from automated submission tools usually used in black hat methods for gaining traffic.
These users have IDs that makes no sense at all and they obviously won’t start any good thread for discussion. To avoid this, you need to have a better anti spam tools installed depending on the forum script you are using.
Such users have almost 0% activity on your forum and might only give spam replies to threads started. This not only wastes your time and energy clearing entries but also uses server and database resources.
Spreading a word about your new forum
Now you need to spend a good amount of time spreading a word about your newly launched forum. There are some most popular methods usually found on internet like getting back links, doing a good search engine optimization, bookmarking your website on social bookmarking websites, joining social networking websites and getting followers.
That way you can get enough traffic to your website and potential members. But again they would not join if they don’t find any good threads or content on your website.
Getting started with forum – Hiring Forum Posters
Hiring forum posters is one of the best and widely used methods to get started with your newly launched forum. That way genuine visitor can find some user activity and threads to join and discuss new topics.
If you are unable to spend some on forum posters, you can do it by yourself by creating multiple accounts. Make sure the IP address does not show up with the thread and replies. Many forums display logged IP address of the reply poster or thread starter.
If you start a thread and reply to your own thread from your own personal computers then you will end up making a fool out of yourself and other real visitors would be laughing their ass off looking at the same IP address talking to itself.
Forum posters are usually good at such stuffs, some work as a team and if you hire multiple posters then that would help you.
How to make members join the forum and increase potential
- Have some Content: Provide some content on your website by creating web pages on your forum. Many forums have options for creating extra custom pages. Best thing to do would be to write content on what your forum is about or simply what is the purpose behind creating that website.
- Provide Incentives: Provide file downloads option on your website. This is one of the best methods of making visitors join your forum.
I have used this method to get members to one of my other website. I used to get a lot of organic traffic to my website. I wanted those visitors to join the forum for discussing. The website was for students and hence it had a lot of potential for active user activity. I provided a lot of downloadable files to them as resources, then I thought of using those files as a bait to make them forum members and start using the forum.
I simply created a forum thread for each downloadable file with explanation and uploaded the files again as an attachment. To download those files members had to get themselves registered and that way genuine member started increasing on my forum.
- Ask friends for help: You can ask some of your close friends to help you with the forum. Get them to register and start a discussion.
- Be active: You as an owner and forum starter need to value each thread and even replies. Reply to each reply made by a user. Reply to each new thread started.
Often many of the threads are unanswered, you need to focus on such threads and try to answer them to improve activity.
