Best advertising/promotion method for your forum?

So, what is one of your best advertising method for your forum? What are some ways that you go out and promote?

Personally, I find that getting mentions on posts, threads, reviews, and blogs; and also linking to my forum via my signatures work the best. especially if users are impressed on what you bring to the table.

So, what's up? Share some methods, lets help one another out.

 

Since my board is about Outdoors/sports - I got out there in field talk with people ..let them know about us and it's worth it !

 

For me it's been word of mouth. I really like the whole idea of people referring their friends because they like the joint.

Other than that when I'm running purely for profit Adwords worked well.

 

That seems to the be the biggest factor for me as well. And links on some game's footers usually help me as well. I just lost a link on of the smaller games, but hopefully we can come across some extra exposure in the few months or something.

I've never tried affiliate marketing or anything - do you make big bucks with it?

 

That's the hardest part for me, but I do invite my friends & post a linking signature on big boards that helps alot

 

I'm in the process of setting up gameservers for my gaming forum. Hoping it'll bring in a few members and it's also a nice addition for current members.

Just setup a CS:S server yesterday. Going to see how the server handles it with 16/16 and then maybe try and squeeze a TF:2 gameserver on the same machine.

 

You all have some great ways of getting members to your forum. I promote my forum on my business website and social networking sites. I also promote in some forums and on blogs as allowed to do without being spammy. Then, of course, there is word of mouth which seems to be one of the greatest ways to gain new traffic and members.

 

Video contests are very effective, everyone here should consider hosting it at least once on their forum.

 

Just bring a lot of good content and do it frequently. I was amazed to see how well people reacted to my forums. I have promoted in various places: webmaster / admin / promotion forums and, as cpvr said, promoting some good content (my book, articles etc) got people interested. I had many join just cause they liked the content and some came since they loved the design for the forums. So the 'keyword' here should be quality. Even if you have a small site, if you show you care, people will respond to it.

 

There are many methods to promote a forum but it can take some time to see the results. Forum Marketing, marketing through Facebook , Twitter, Pinterest etc., all these methods work but you need to build a list of targeted followers in your niche. You can also try banner marketing, link exchange and even media buys if you are willing to spend some money.

 

Right now, out of all the methods I've been using, I believe my very best method is article writing. Article writing lends itself to being versatile. Especially among the social networks. You can literally just link to them and let the traffic fly in. And you have the added bonus of submitting your links to various article websites for added traffic.

 

I was doing article writing for a while, and were doing blog guest posts to help us get more links, and it did help. If I had the time, I'd write a lot more. I'm also a huge fan of writing certain content/topics on a forum, and placing your link at the of article[if its allowed]

 

In some cases, you don't even have to go as far as placing your link in your article.

Say for example my site. I run a playstation gaming tournament site. I've recently starting writing articles for it. So what I've done was I took those articles and submitted them to sites like n4g.

N4g is a gaming news website so it lends perfectly to my site offering articles to it. It bring the visitors in real fast, helps the SEO, ads to my ad totals, and potentially gets more visitors and players for my ps3 gaming tournaments.

So basically, the articles help the site branch out in MANY ways.

With advertising you have to basically try to use one method to branch multiple uses. That's the best way to get fast results WITHOUT having to pay for them.

 

double post, sorry

 

Now that's a great way to do that. I remember when I used to use "DIGG" to get traffic and links, it worked like a charm and brought in a lot of links. I was also thinking - a good way would be to write about certain guides/games in your niche, and then spread that thread out; asking others for their thoughts, etc. It usually works as well.

 

I can vouch for this tidbit. I have been doing this for a while now with sites like Carlos 360, MW3Blog, and SFvsTekken.

 

Yeah it's amazing how much traffic that one site can generate. I LITERALLY saw my visitors shoot up by the thousands when I put my articles there.

 

That's the same as having graphic tutorials and submitting it to good-tutorials, right?

 

No. Each time you submit an article to N4G, you're treating it like a magnified Facebook. Because all you're doing is marketing your article to that class of niche. And unlike Facebook; you can submit your own "marketing" speech, without touching the SEO part of the blog engine like Wordpress/All in one SEO. You can post a large paragraph, and an image that attracts people to your article. Think of it like this: It's a mix between a real magazine, and Facebook, with comments.

Here's some examples:
http://n4g.com/news/761411/mw3blog-first-details-of-mw3 - This article alone, netted me Four Thousand Visits. 4,000 visits.
http://n4g.com/news/812799/what-the-a-and-is-wrong-with-firebrand - This one was a bit more viral.
And now, my most recent achievement was this one:
http://n4g.com/news/990440/codnet-first-details-of-black-ops-2

View attachment 391
Eighteen shares.

 

Signature links have always been my greatest source. I don't mean just posting spam and hoping someone clicks either. I mean that by actively participating in other communities, people get to know me and then want to follow me back to my own forum, too. It takes time, but it has long term effects.