Anyone here run their own forums?
 

How the hell do you guys get members.. i'm trying to get started.. but here's my stats since September 2nd

Threads: 70, Posts: 403, Members: 48

:(

Any tips?

I run one for mainstream. http://www.RealityTVFriends.com/forum . I have over 1200 friends on myspace and I'm using a commenter program to comment everyone's myspace profile. It's decent so far. My page has only been up a couple of days, too.

That's great to hear... i just started a myspace profile and am gaining members from groups related to my forums.. almost 300 friends in 3 days. ill bust out the auto commenter soon

Where do you advertise it?

I just started out with adwords, which was a huge mistake because the niche has a very large PPC rate, and people were going to a near empty forum and not registering due to the lack of activitiy. live and learn

a friend just pointed me to forumtrends.com, so hopefully this will help out

Here's where I bought the commenter. You can also buy a mass friend adder, too.

http://www.friendadder.com/

If you want to take a long way of doing it, you can go to http://www.backpage.com (using firefox) and then open up every city in a different tab and put into the adult section about your site for free.

I run a medium-sized (800k posts) forum. Its a fuckin bitch to get any new traffic to it. Getting listed on big-boards will get you some clicks, but you need 500k posts to get listed.

Anyone that has traffic sources for this, let me know, I'll pay well.

try buying ad space on blogs or other places surfers frequent

www.pimpspromo.com

I don't have a rate card with me, but will respond when I get home next week if interested

LOL

I did that without any help and without any effort, other than posting on my own board. Also, getting the pagerank in place in whatever time also depends on how close to a PR update you start the site and how fast Google spiders backlinks to you.

A good forum should build itself with SE traffic and word of mouth. :2 cents:

se traffic rocks for forums.

Building a forum is an art.
Hiring paid posters is no short cut in my book. Part of the solution is to have a genre or topic you are interested in and persuing it.

If you need mainstream forum assistance, ICQ me for some 1 on 1 coaching :) I'm here to help adult webmasters who are diversifying into mainstream :)

you spam and scam
who would of thought

I used to run some boards. I drove traffic to them by going to other boards with a similar theme and posting (useful) topics and replies, and having a link to my board in my sig.

Like someone else said though, whatever you do make sure your board has some activity first. People will click away really quick if there are only a few posts there to start with.

Yep. Blog comments help as well. As long as the "lead" material is ON POINT and actually ADDS to the conversation on the forum/blog you are promoting on, this should be fine. Also, build link swaps with sites that accept your comments/posts.

Some of them are a waste of time.

I have a forum

Threads: 1,006, Posts: 19,916, Members: 1,412

Its been up for 7 months and not one member on there has purchased anything from my ref links.

I am closing it down as it has been a big waste of time.

People go to forums for free things.

I hope you will atleast sale it :Oh crap you can do branding even if they don't buy stuff.

i used to run download foru m, but thats sold now

Word of mouth works best.