Ten Great Tips for Successful Forum Growth

While this may sound like obvious advice, it is often overlooked. To keep visitors coming back, your forum must provide something for the user to want to become a member. The most effective way to attract members is to have an active forum. Of course, that presents a classic chicken & egg scenario. The best advice is to be active yourself and recruit family and friends to post in your forum if possible. It's all about fresh content, so expect to be your #1 poster for some a while.

Starting a forum with no primary topic is going to be difficult at best, and will not get you a lot of members very quickly, unless you know a lot of people. Find a topic that appeals to you, and make it the primart focus of your forum. It is acceptable to have a couple sub-forums dedicated for idle conversation, but make sure that the primary topic of your forum remains dominant.

Blogs are becomming increasing popular, both with people and search engines. If you already have a blog, post links to your forum and forum news frequently. If you don't have one now is as good of a time as any. Make sure you post in your blog at least a couple times a week to give the appearance that it is active.

The hard truth is that successful forums are not just started by the one person, they must be maintained on a daily basis by them too. I cannot emphasize this suggestion enough; you have to be active in your forum! If activity is slow, post a couple messages to get people attention and engage them in discussion. Remember, as a forum owner not only are you responsible for the content of your forum, you also have a an interest in makng it succeed. A good rule of thumb is to visit your forum at least once a day, preferably twice as a comfortable minimum. Be sure to reply to posts when needed so your forum does not appear to be slowing down. A neglected board is doomed to fail.

The old adage applies with forum too. Start with just a few forums since creating dozens of forums to begin with will only serve to confuse and overwhelm your users. Worse off, but having dozens of forums with few if any posts will give the impression that your forum is dead. Start with no more two or three main categories with a totle of no more than 6-8 sub-forums.

Style is a matter of personal taste, but when it comes to your forum, your taste must also be appealing to your target audience. It's equally as temping to keep the stock style as it is to plan with the numerous available styles, but always remember what your user experience will be. Choose a style that is the best match to your target audience. This will enhance your forums mass appeal. And don't get carried away; using a Hello Kitty style on a web development forum is not exactly a good match. However using a style with dark colors would ideal for forums covering sci-fi and other similar topics.

Create and clearly state your forum rules and expectations a friendly, welcoming way. Since you want your visitors to become members, you must make them feel welcome. A good rule of thumb is to require civil conduct; i.e. no profanity, flaming, personal attacks, etc. Keep your rules short, and to the point but try not to come across as overly restrictive or controlling.

This is a very important suggestion. Create contests for your members. People love to win stuff, even free things like special user titles, privileges, etc. Be creative and keep your forum fun, informative, and easy to navigate. Ask your members to donate a dollar towards a contest, or fund one out of your own pocket. A few dollars is all you need, and everyone wins. Your members get a great prize, and you get loyal members.

Once you have mastered the fine art of running your forum, then the time is right to begin some outside promotion. Outside promotion could easily be the topic for a another article entirely here are some basic suggestions to start wtih. Directories are a good way to get noticed. In fact when you signed up for your forum, it was automatically listed in our search engine friendly directory and will eventually be found by most major search engines. But don't stop there, you have many more opporunities that can be explored... Use the search engines to locate directories relevent to the topic of your forum. Invite your friends and family to participate. Put a link to your board in your e-mail and forum signatures. And finally, be active in other forums covering similar topics.

Even with all of the right ingredients, building a successful forum takes time. Rome, as they say was not built in a day, neither will your forum. Devote the time and energy needed to be involved, and follow these suggestions, and soon your forum will gain momentum and start to grow on it's own.