The first 100 members

In my opinion, the first batch of active members are the hardest to get on your forum. Your forum starts off as a land of nothing, with nobody but yourself, and very little content. It's not easy to market a brand-new forum to anybody, so how did you lure and reel in your first 100 (approximately) members?

 

Tell me about it

I think I'll be watching this thread closely

 

Me three.

Erm...

Me too.

 

For my Halo 3 clan,it was primarily advertising over at Bungie.net with a great Classifieds section they have for group recruitment. The game was really fresh and new back in 2007 and I think it was just easier to find really passionate people during that time, and many of those first 100 are still active today.

 

Nobody wants to share their secret methods of attaining the first 100 members? :lol:

On one of my forums from the past, I gained my first handful of members by answering questions on Yahoo Answers in my forum's subject/category with a link to my forum in the "source" field. This brought a lot of traffic and most often converted very well in regards to registrations.

 

I've just started trying that out right now :p

 

Handed out business cards for the site at a national event. 2 days later there were 500 members and it's been off to the races ever since.

 

Answering questions on my subject in Yahoo Answers and advertising on blogs/web sites in my related fields.

 

Just being helpfull and friendly in other forums is a great advertizement. That's how I follow most of mine.

I also actively look for new forums going up to check out competition, new techniques, and other things.

 

told a couple car owners about, posted a few times on sum other forums with the link in the sig...and a whole lot of referrrals...;-)

 

I did a similar thing.
I did a Google/Yahoo/MSN search for keywords relating to what my site is about and went through a lot of the links from the results and started answering questions, being helpful and putting a link back to my site for the source of the information. Reason why I did this for, if a user is searching for the same keywords as me, those same site links will show up and now in them, will have a link to the source of my answer. Of course I was being careful not to spam their sites so the information there were actually relevant and helpful to the post concerned so I wasn't stepping on anyones toes......