How did you get your forum off the ground?

Starting a forum from scratch is no easy task. What all did you do to get your forum moving along at a steady growth rate, ultimately leading to your success today?

 

Well, we basically started, on Pisoga, telling the old users, it was pretty nice to see them, even if it was for a bit, and we used the chat's traffic to re-direct it to the forum same as the Pisoga forum traffic. ^^! We are still adding some anime,, so when we finish mainstream, we will start trying to advertise, we made a twitter and all.

 

I actually stole members from a few competing sites. It started with me PMing a few guys I regularly discussed things with at another site telling them, hey I've started my own site. Then another competing site was forced to close and I started contacting their members to continue at my site.

From there I've posted links to my site elsewhere when there is something relative to share.

 

My first attempt was posting some links in other forums with related topics, which did not work out too well. I was not banned from the other site, its just that nobody signed up.

Directory submission was a waste of time.

The best things I did was open a portal to my forum and making my own youtube videos.

 

First I explained the importance of regular posting to the mods I "inherited" as they had been neglected by the forum owner so long they didn't know what to do. I also tried a contest which got exactly one entry. (!) After several months of daily new topics from us, greeting newbies warmly, people finally started talking on their own.

 

What seems to have worked really well for me has been contacting desired community members one at a time and inviting them to the forum. This sounds like it would take forever, but if you invite the best people, the other people will follow.

We've also bought blog posts to promote our forum. One blog post worked out really well, the rest didn't do much at all.

We've also made comments on blog posts specifically related to our niche. The comments were very clear invitations to our forum. Those work as well as blog posts.

We've placed a lot of signature links on competing of forums. Those aren't working as well as I had thought they would, but our main competitor is still our #1 referrer.

We held a contest to see who could invite the most new members. Unfortunately, this attracted the worst kind of people and I ended up deleting hundreds of spam posts from the forum. That was a total nightmare and cost us some real community members.

We've recently started an AdWords campaign aimed at bringing thirty new visitors a day to our forum. It seems to be working, but I am not yet tracking how many of those people actually sign up for the forum.

We're receiving a surprising number of referrals from organic search. 42.51% of our traffic is from the search engines.

I can tell people are talking about us, because mail.google.com and mail.yahoo.com are two of our top referrers.

 

That is about the same thing with me :lol:


So do you own a gun forum as well...maybe we can trade some post?

 

I have gun forums at the current time, but I think a blog post to Gun Shots will do Semi Auto Rifles some good.

 

Like I've mentioned we kinda split from another site, so a lot of people were already on board, then we all invited our friends as well. A couple of the "crews" that I was in had several members join (including over 90% of 2) and get to posting because I was in good rapport with them. I host an online radio show and also advertised it on there as I was still making the threads about the radio shows on the other site as well.