Forums

Atomic · 27-11-06

Hi fellas and ladies

I wonder if any of you can help me?

Ok, I have a site (see my signature) and its only a month old, it does great traffic (crazy ammount as it goes) and I'm actually making some sales.

I setup up a forum and its has 70 odd members, but all the users are my mates, work collegues etc, to get the forum active - my problem is getting 'new' users to the forums to make them self sustaining. I am running a caption competition to win free memory sticks and I can see from my stats that folk are visiting but it ain't happening, I'm tring my SEO stuff to get up the Search engines and am making some ground

Has anyone else started of forums and if you have, how did you 'get them going'?

btw, feel free to sign up and see if you can win the prizes

Thanks
Paul

srcudlipp · 27-11-06

You could try Forum Angels, but they won't really do any more than your mates already are.

Apart from that - a bigger prize in your competition?

DavidSWP · 06-12-06

Well its great that you have so many friends and colleagues that find your site useful. That's a good indication that it would be a useful site to a wider audience especially since its on a very specialist subject and not just a place for you to gossip with your mates (which a lot of forums are). Unortunately though you now have the long slog of getting it well indexed and ranked in the major search engines.

If you have just a few incoming links and very unique content that people are searching for then you can get a decent amount of visitors without doing a huge amount of SEO and promotion. If your site is repeating information available elsewhere then I'm afraid you have to do all the work of getting 1000s of back links to your site with the usual methods e.g. Directories, syndication of articles and content, etc.

I'd read some of the more general threads on website promotion. I'd definately encourage your existing users to write as much as possible and share their knowledge. This will make Google etc. think you are an active site with at least a degree of uniqueness.