Well a lot of people wonder, "How do I promote my forum?" and it's not something that can be done over night.
There are many ways you can promote your forum by and my favorite one of them all is
SEO. We use
vBseo at focused and it takes care of all our
SEO needs. So when you make a thread instead of the url being a number, it's your thread title which will help get more targeted visitors.
Link building is also key. I post around other forums and have my links in the signatures of the forums. I use anchor texts to target my long term SERP goal. For Focused I use Webmaster forum. Then you need to find some long tail (4-6 words) terms and try ranking #1 for them. You want to repeat the long term keywords so you can get lots of little traffic.
You need to make yourself unique as well. What separates you from your competitor? Here at Focused we offer free blogs and we share the revenue with you! Our competitors surely don't hand out free blogs, and most don't share the revenue with it's community.
Use social sites to help promote yourself! Digg and Stumble are two of my favorite social sites. They help bring me a lot of traffic which can help get a lot of unique visitors. If you make it to the front page of a social networking site you can be sure to get 100,000s of hits within hours.
The main goal is to convert lurkers into members. This could be hard. You need to do something that could trigger them to join. Say you have some hot threads that have some good solid interesting debating, and they'd like to take part, they would be more inclined to join. So if you can get these kind of threads going it would increase your conversion rate. Also if you offer e-books and downloads or free products to registered members only and create a 'hype' about them elsewhere people would join to download them.
Another thing to keep your forum going is return visitors. These are key as they will be the base of your forum. Without them, you won't have any activity. These are the members that will make your posts for new members to post in etc. A good way to keep them coming if your forum is still new is to send out interesting news letters or offers. Things such as a new version of your product, or a new product that you can offer them because of a Joint Venture you have just closed.
Another thing that you must consider unless you are stinking rich is monetization. Without an income, you may not be able to keep your forum online at all. When monetizing a forum, you need to consider which route you will go down. CPC or CPM. CPC will get less clicks, as forum users won't read them or be inclined to click the ads. Whereas, CPM ads will pay you for every impression regardless. You could consider using both at once, or set CPM ads as your defaults for CPC. What ever you do, you need to get a stable income from your forum, enough to market it and pay for your hosting costs.
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