When do you start promoting?

When do you start promoting a new forum that you've come up with?

I'm starting a new forum, and I have all of the structure in place, but I need to style it.

Right now there is only a "Coming Soon" page for people to view.

Would you start linking to it now or wait until it's open?

By promoting, I mean adding links to your signatures or links in your posts, or whatever you do to promote your sites...

 

I usually wait until the forum is fairly established with a solid foundation. To me, that is when there are several hundred posts, with a steady stream of new posts per day, and plenty of members.

I think it's a waste to advertise something that isn't complete or ready (or attractive) because it will turn visitors off, and they may never check back. Therefore, you essentially just wasted your chance at capturing them.

 

I agree with nick, i would wait until you have some content set up on the site and stuff for your potential members to see and do.

 

It depends.

For my last site I had almost everything in place. The forum setup, the style and a few add ons. Did a bit of testing all worked and put up page with the logo and Opening at x time on s date. Then took 1000 business cards with the site info to a national event for the subject where I pretty much was a whore for the site for 4 days. Got back and oped the doors. 500 registered members in just under 72 hours....

So it really depends on how you plan on that grand opening....

 

My forum's been up for about a month now, so far I've done a few post exchanges with some people to get some posts going, want to do a few more and will probably get advertising in a week or two

 

Thanks, All.

I didn't know if giving out the link to people and search engines before the site opened would be good or not. But I guess it would cause a lot of people to not come back, so I'll wait until I have it ready for posting.

 

I didn't actually start full on promoting my forum til about a year after I had created it. But that was because I didn't really know much about it all, and now that I'm wiser I would probably do so a lot earlier for my next forum

 

I start promoting as soon as the forum sections/categories are setup, new theme is installed, and some post are made.

 

i wait til some posts have been made first, and we have added sections, a style, logo, stuff like that.

 

I haven't started promoting my site much yet, just a little and we've been open since late June. I just asked friends to join and so far we've made about 20k posts
I'm liking that idea of yours gnatster, I know I can hand cards like those to a lot of people lol

 

I too wouldn't promote my site until it's fully up and running with posts etc and when you have very little change left to do. I made the mistake of promoting my site to the search engines too soon (and import from an existing site) but found some bugs and did some changes and now I have a lot of 'dead' URL links in Google which takes ages to be removed and I get penalised for it.

Also you don't want to put new visitors off with just a "Welcome" screen, they would think they've just wasted their time and will have the "Welcome" screen in their minds when they see another link from you etc...