How to promote forums?

Speaking as a promotions professional, I suggest drastically slashing the number of boards you have. It's all about image, and seeing a dozen boards with zero, or just a few posts on it portrays the image that nobody is using your board (which is almost true). People are likely to feel that it may be a waste of time to post because there isn't enough of an audience to reply back. Start with just a few boards of broader appeal (ie. Open topic). This will concentrate your posts in one or just a few boards and not make your board look so sparse. It will always be difficult to start a board from scratch. It takes time but once you start getting people to post regularly it will work exponentially. People will begin to see that your board does get frequent posts and will be more likely to post themselves. Then start to expand to additional boards after you've get your base going.

Awesome advice, fifeclub! I'll get straight to the point. What do I see when I visit your forums? First of all, you have no logo. Plain text isn't going to cut it. You need some kind of aesthic appeal. Secondly, as fifeclub pointed out, having 0-post forums is a MAJOR turnoff. How many times have you participated in an empty forum? I don't prefer to waste my time that way. It's like talking to a wall.

I would start with two or three forums and start some conversations yourself. Invite all your friends, family members, anyone you know to post. Perhaps start a contest to get people interested. And if you're desperate, registering multiple times and talking to yourself can be effective.

Furthermore, I think you need to FOCUS your forums. I see freebie and webmaster themes. You need to pick ONE at this stage and go with it. You aren't large enough to try to go in both ways.

And finally, I find your color scheme (or lack thereof) extremely displeasing. Bright blue on black isn't appealing. You need to have a logo that matches your scheme and stick with it. Usually, sites settle for a compromise - not just a bright blue or bright red. I mean, look at what TWF does with red. It's a nice one, not bright red.

Good luck!

Quote: Originally posted by mjames
And if you're desperate, registering multiple times and talking to yourself can be effective.

I didn't want to admit it, but I've done that too!

I also have not had any success whatsoever in getting people to post on my forums. I have tried everything, including running contests, posting many times myself, having friends post, and even creating a couple of user names and talking to myself.

Any advise you can give me would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I think that another factor that comes into play here is competition and subject matter. I find that in most subject areas there are a few communities that are really highly popular among the user base. The users don't want to waste their time on a new board when they can get everything they need from their old favourites.

You also have to ask yourself what people want to talk about. Do people really want to talk about free stuff? Maybe you don't need a message board at all...

Would you consider these forums to fit the right starting conditions? We have tried to keep them simple and organized and plan on advertising them very soon. Any suggestions for our boards?

I think that when building a forum you have to ask yourself whether people would want come back and *discuss* things on a regular basis. Are people going to want to come to this board just to hang out? Are they going to want to sit around talking about your site? Probably not - they might stop by briefly while they're deciding whether or not to sign up for your service but that's about it. What you could do is lose the forums and move those functions to other parts of the site (announcements in a section on the front page, questions answered via e-mail and maybe a FAQ) or add a wider variety of general topics such as web design discussion, open critiques forum, things like that - things that people would want to discuss. I would probably go with the first option.

It seems to me that forums can be kind of gimmicky - like gratuitous animation and things like that. People put them into their sites without thinking about whether or not there's a good reason to have one. Building a strong community is a difficult thing to do and it's really not going to work with every site.

I've also seen quite a few sites trying to use forums to interact with their clients (as Webcritic is doing). As a user I find this really annoying, particularly if I'm paying for a service. It just makes me think that the business doesn't care about me as a client. Personalized e-mail is a better method of communication in this case (IMHO). Although I guess the forum approach is better than canned e-mail responses that never really answer your question.

This is what I did to promote The Bahamas Writer Forums:

1. Announced it on all the local Bahamian forums
2. Announced it in The Bahamas Writer Newsletter
3. Submitted it to all the major search engines
4. Linked to it from every page on BahamasWriter.com
5. Submitted it to Dmoz, Yahoo and other directories International and local.
6. Announced it on local mailing lists
7. Sent out press releases to writer's web sites, which accept PR.
8. And had the Bahamas Writer email everyone she knew about the new forums.

The first week we picked up most of our members but to increase from there will take getting more traffic to BahamasWriter.com which is a new site.

http://www.bahamaswriter.com/forum/default.asp

Good luck,
Gavin