How to promote a forum (NO BUDGET !)
Many people have been wondering how to create a nice forum community, where people would make questions and answers to each other. Luckily there are some free tricks that can help you to create a community like that. But it will take you a lot of effort to get there !
One of the tricks that a lot of webmasters have been using is creating a fake live community. What webmasters are actually doing is that they have registered themselves under different names and are responding to their own questions but with other user names. This is certainly one of the best things you can do, first of all because people will think that your forum has a lot of members that post a lot so people will love to register to your forum and second of all because you will get a lot of content that will be indexed by major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN which will later on bring you most of the traffic.
You should always focus on the niche of your forum and advertise it on websites where people that would be interested in your forum will be. For example if you own a gardening forum you should go to another gardening or botanic forum add the link to your forum in signature and make some quality posts that will attract people to your forum. While we are at other forums, you should never spam ! That will rebel people from visiting your website! You should also make a blog about gardening with unique and quality posts and promote your forum in posts.
The thing that can also bring you some traffic is link exchange. You should always look for websites that are writing about the niche that you are using for your forum and ask them for link exchange. This link change will give visitors and members of your forum a good resource and on the other hand people that will visit that gardening website will see a link to gardening forum and visit it.
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January 12th, 2008 at 7:56 am
I have used this tips on my forum and now I get 3x more posts per day.
April 15th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Clever move. Never thought of this before. Despite of the great effort you will spend to this technique I think it’s all worth it. Aside from doing this faking technique you might as well invite you friends to check out the site and collect lots of active emails this way your site will get known easily. Another thing is join forums that have the same topic as yours and provide your signature with the link directing to your forum.
-Jan