How
to get members for your forumfrom the blog HOWTOFLOW.COM
I noticed so many people on webmaster forums asking how they can get more members
to their forum. I will be the first to tell you that its one of the hardest things
I have ever done. You might as well just bookmark this article now because your
gonna want to come back and refer to it. First your gonna have to ask
yourself what a forum is. If you were to ask me this is what I would tell you. What
is a forum? Here are my answers. - .Its an information database
- This means that if your forum is about artwork then chances are theres going
to be tons and tons of information and peoples experiences related to artwork.
People will use the search function on your forum to search through thousands
of posts/threads to get what they are looking for. People will also find your
forum when they look up specific information with Google and other search engines.
- Its
a community - No this doesent mean that everyone at a forum is a loser looking
for friends. It simply means that you are giving people a place where they can
discuss whatever your forums about with likeminded people. After a while your
forum will get its own feel to it. I have noticed most communities start giving
nicknames to their members as a whole, for example at sherdog.net members are
reffered to as sherdoggers or at digitalpoint.com they are usually called DP’ers.
This is what you want, you want a sense of community and kinship. People who feel
this way will be quick to invite friends.
Remember human beings are social
creatures, like Joe Rogan said in prison they punish inmates by taking them away
from all the killers, rapists and thieves and put them in solitary confinement.
People need other people to be happy, thats a scientific fact. You might actually
save lives by giving people a place where they can interact and be creative. Now
that we know what a forum is how can we use this information to get more members?
Well both of these things I listed represent value. A forum is an information
database right? WELL THEN GET SOME INFORMATION UP THERE! - Is your
forum about fish? Then post some great fish articles! Write your own or if
your gonna use other peoples make sure the first thing you post is the source
of the article as in the url, don’t ever take from people with out giving them
a link, a link is gold to webmasters and is the only reason why they would allow
you to post their content on your forum.
WHEN YOU MAKE GOOD THREADS THIS
WILL NOT ONLY GIVE PEOPLE SOMETHING TO READ BUT WILL GIVE SEARCH ENGINE SPIDERS
CONTENT TO SLURP UP AND DISPLAY IN THEIR SEARCH RESULTS. Try making a
Frequently Asked Questions(F.A.Q.) about your topic and stickying or pinning the
thread. This can be an awesome resource your can provide first time visitors right
off the bat. Post every youtube video related to your topic you can find,
make your own youtube videos then put a link to your forum in the vid and in the
video description. Once you get some members you can have contests where members
will make videos, make sure part of the rules are they have to include your url
in the videos. Youtube can be a great marketing tool for any website, don’t forget
that. Whenever you write up a nice post/article/FAQ or if you make a
vid or whatever else you do to add content you can use social bookmarking like
Digg.com or stumbleupon.com to share it with the world. Don’t do this with other
peoples content obviously only your own. You can Digg or Stumble good quality
threads just like a blog post, just make sure theres lots of good content in whatever
your sharing. Make sure you don’t overdo it or you will get banned from Digg like
what happened to me. I Dug too many crappy short threads with short first posts. Remember,
no content=no visitors You can even set up an rss feed to make posts
in a certain part of the forum everytime it updates. You may even want to use
a bunch of rss feeds to not only post in a certain forum but to show up on your
main portal page using products like vbadvanced(for vbulletin). This can make
your mainpage into a news resource.
The great thing about having a
blog or any other non forum site is that the traffic you already have will filter
into your forum and become members. Instead of using a portal script like vbulletin
you might even want to use a blog as your mainpage. For example if I was to add
a forum to this site I would have the url be http://forum-staters.com/forum Ok
we established the importance of content, now remember every forum member you
get is someone who will possibly add lots and lots of content to your forum, a
great reason to be nice to everyone who visits. Actually another thing you should
remember is never under any circumstances be an asshole to anyone, you will just
drive people away with all the negativety. I had to learn this the hard way and
I still have trouble keeping my mouth shut alot of the time. Just remember that
theres never any pride on the line over the internet, don’t let anyone piss your
off or have any sort of control over your emotions. This sorta leads
into my next major recommendation to anyone starting a brand new forum or anyone
who’s having trouble getting members. - Be a bunch of people!
People
want to join a forum with activity, noone wants to join a dead community and if
they do join they most likely will not come back. The thing is though
if you sign up yourself under alot of different names and post this content under
different names it will make your forum look 100% more active for ever username
you sign up as. I know this sounds stupid but ask yourself what will look better.
A forum with just one member or a forum with 5 members who post new content regularly?
Create some unique characters or “gimmicks” as forumers refer to them as and try
to make them as funny/entertaining as possible. If your gonna fight with someone
online fight with yourself lol. This is your chance to be creative and show off
some writing skills. - Get posters by any means necessary.
This
means beg people to sign up, beg them to stay. Get a reputation at another forum
and put a link in your sig(do not do this if the forum owner isnt ok with it,
its unethical, usually they don’t care though). Get your friends from real life
to come and make some posts. Offer free downloads to anyone who signs up. Your
gonna have to give people a reason to come back, sometimes all you need is an
active community to get people to come back but when you are first starting you
might want to think of ways you can provide people with something they WANT like
unique content or downloads or even just entertainment. Put together some contests,
send emails to non active members telling them to comeback, do what you gotta
do and use your head. If it applies to your nich you might even want to setup
a personals section where people can find mates who are into the same stuff they
are. You may want to make a Myspace or Face book page specifically for
your forum. You can search for people who you might think will be interested in
your topic and invite them as friends. Be carefull with that though you don’t
want Tom to think your spamming people, I heard hes a badass. - Search
Engine Optimization(SEO).
Yes I know this is a scary and confusing word
for alot of people but without it you might as well forget everything I already
told you and give up on starting your own forum altogether(never give up). First
you need to learn the basics of SEO such as Title Tage Meta
Tags Keywords in your domain Backlinks Trust Domain
Age Anyways you get the idea, I’m gonna cover more forum specific SEO
stuff so please learn about this stuff first using google. Search for stuff like
“Basic website SEO”, “Search Engine Optimization Techniques”,”How To Rank High
With Search Engines” Use the links I post at the bottom of this article,
The forums I will be mentioning are places where I have learned more about SEO(search
engine optimization) than anywhere else. Anyways for those “experts”
out there I will move onto the more forum specific stuff.
-Make your
pages as unique as possible, Remember every thread is also a page that search
engines see. Get rid of useless junk in your forum titles such as “powered by
vbulletin” anything else besides the thread title will just make those threads
less “relevent” to search engines. What this means is if someone searches for
“how to make cheese” then they will be more likely to see your page high up on
the search engine results page if your thread is titled “how to make
cheese” than if its “how to make cheese - powered by vbulletin” Remember
though to keep the copyright information in your footer, you cannot remove that
stuff. -Make sure you have a mainpage that updates with new content regularly,
I did touch on this earlier. You can use Vbadvaned and other portal software to
display the newest forum threads on your front page. Search engines will like
this because to them a main page that constantly is updated means a site that
is more likey to be of higher quality, this will gain you “trust” with search
engines, Google specifically is real big on trust. Remember a blog can also be
a great main/portal page, be sure to make new blog posts regularly. Your main
page will also be your highest PR page so more content equals more possible combinations
of keywords that will cause your main page to pop up on search engines. Make sure
if you have threads feeding to the mainpage that they are from an active subforum
that contains threads/posts related to your nich. - Internal Linking. If
you can, make sure all of your pages not only link back to your homepage but also
link to every forum area. Look at the popular forum http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ See
at the top left of the navbar theres an extra forum jump menu. By having this
they make sure every page/thread is gonna link to all the individual subforums.
The stock forum jump menu at the bottom right hand side does not actually show
the urls if you were to look at the source code. I am not sure about the specifics
of this but I do know Digitalpoint is the biggest forum I have ever seen. By
doing this we make sure that “link juice” passes to each of these main forums
from every page. To understand this you are going to have to learn about how links
and link juice effect your search engine rankings. Make sure any links
that point to your main page are uniform meaning that you don't want half of them
saying www.forums.com and the other half saying forums.com without the www. This
will split up your link juice. Actually you should be only using one or the other
anyway. Get non www. to point to www or vice versa use DNS or a htacess redirect. I’m
not gonna go too much more into SEO since theres more than I could possibly cover
with this one article so from here on out your gonna have to spend your time not
only learning about it but keeping on top of it and other marketing techniques.
Here are my favorite places to learn about SEO/marketing for forums and in general. http://forums.digitalpoint.com
- Huge webmaster/SEO community that with a forum specific area here http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=64 http://www.v7n.com/forums
- A smaller community than Digitalpoint but imo you get more quality information
and less new people asking the same questions over and over. The owner John is
a really nice guy who is always quick to offer advice. http://www.bzimage.org
- A great new forum related to SEO and marketing. Even though its still a new
community you will still find tons of great info to help you market and SEO your
forum. http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/forum
- This is specifically for Vbulletin users but alot of the tricks and tips can
be applied to other forum scripts too. This is hands down the best place to learn
SEO for forums imo. Check out the Vbulletin SEO section here http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=17
-remember to look at the things these sites do with their forums in fact study
every forum you come across and be sure to ask yourself key questions such as
“how did this forum get users?” or “why would anyone keep coming back here?” conclusion: Now
are these tips going to gaurantee success with your forum? Of course not, only
a ton of determination, alot of smarts and a little luck will gaurantee success.
Be nice to people, generate good karma and remember to always be thinking of new
ways to get that new member. At some point probably after your first
2 or 3 thousand members you should reach a “critical mass” point and the community
itself will start attracting new members. Once you are there you should at least
be satisfied that you started a community but if you want to make sure people
don’t move onto greener pasture and if you really want to start earning some $$$
your gonna have to keep working hard forever. Just remember to take a World of
Warcraft or Call of Duty 4 break every so many hours to refresh yourself
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