When to advertise

When in a forum's 'life' do you think is the right time to invest in some advertising, such as Google AdWords? In the beginning, shortly after launch, or when the site is fairly active and established?

My personal opinion is that advertising shouldn't be done until the site has some decent activity going on, because otherwise, visitors will have nothing to see and will leave the site, thus rendering your advertising campaign useless.

 

I say when you have enough content to keep new guest interested

 

I too agree - when your site has enough good content to make it useful and worthwhile for your visitors otherwise you'll just waste your advertising money.

I started my advertising alittle early to be honest but I had the basis of my site all setup such as Knowledge Base, Articles, Downloads and Tools alread setup. I advertised to get more members on the site.

With advertising, have an idea what your intentions are when advertising. For me, it was to provide a Download of Tools and Resources for MP3/MP4 player so I targets my Adwords around that which was really effective as once members got on the site to find useful tools and resources for their player, they then started posting on the forum asking questions and sharing information. Then once the Search Engines picked the posts/threads up, I got more traffic. I only advertised 1-2 months and that was all I needed. It was also to get more search results into Google as most of new incoming traffic are from Google.

 

I started investing into my videos when my forum opened.

As of today, I have yet to buy any advertising, besides the money I spent making my videos.

 

I'm contemplating advertising now. I'm about to receive a nice check from Google and want to put most of it back into the site with adwords and facebook ads.

 

This month I sponsoring a contest for a merchant that is giving away $6,000 worth of stuff. To make sure that he is getting his moneys worth, I'am trying to tap into some advertising, such as asking bloggers to post about the contest,,, stuff like that.

As for buying google adwords, I just dont know. If the site is empty, nobody is going to join.

 

My suggestion is to start advertising as soon as your website is launched. Then people will know that your site exists First off start with free methods such as directories, link exchange, boards etc… before going into paid ones.

 

first of all .......u should focus on posting new high quality and fresh content and then you should think about advertising it........because visitors should find something interesting and fresh on you site ....only then they will become members