10 Ways To Promote Your Forum!

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10 Ways To Promote Your Forum!

I have been into forums for quite some time now and to be honoust I'm developing a highly unique new forum concept which we have very high expectations off.

I'll give you my tips on how to increase traffic to your forums and maybe you can use some of it.

1. Use Vbseo to search engine optimize your forum as much as possible. This is only possible with vbulletin though and so you immediatly know my preference in terms of forum software. They are the best on the market today.

2. Optimize Vbseo as much as possible to increase search engine visits. Vbseo is a powerfull software but it can still be optimized far more. To give you an example about how to optimize for optimal results you can look here:
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3. Optimize vbulletin to it's fullest which means deleting stuff you don't use. Some options which you don't use require so much server resources that it slows your forum down which means it's less accessable for spiders of the search engines. You can read a post here:
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4. Be unique is a very powerfull one. Don't start a forum when you are number 500 in that niche. It just doesn't work unless you have $100k marketing budget. Add something unique to it and promote this unique
feature to your members.

5. Add high quality to your forum! Very important! Would you go to a forum where you only read oneliners? Hey, how are you doing? Fine and you? This kind of post don't add value! Instead you can write How To's, Articles and Tutorials. Don't know what to write? Go to Yahoo Answers and look for questions in your niche ofcourse and look to questions with 10-15 answers and copy all this info in a textfile and start rewriting this into a How To, Article or Tutorial. This is indemand information people are looking for.

6. More is more. By this I mean be active all day and add content all day. Be helpfull to your members and add more quality content.

7. ALWAYS set the emailfunction in the admin to on. Members need to receive an email when they create a thread to keep them updated. People also need to receive an email when they posted in a thread. They need to be subscribed to posts automatically in the beginning at least. (until 25.000 members) This get's them comming back to your forum more often. Many people just don't use this option enough.

8. Add your forums link to your signature on other forums but with this I would think about two very important things first. When doing this please don't use bright collors. Just use the standard collor and just mention your forum name. Don't make the link say stuff like visit this link or whatever. But before you add your link to your signature start helping people on that forum out with answering questions for a few weeks. After a few weeks start writing tutorials, articles and how to's. Add value to their site and you will receive. When you start doing this you can also add your forum signature but still only mention the name. By doing this people will start wondering who you are since they start noticing you. Always remember you are entering a community!

9. Think viral. Offer members premium memberships if they refer members/traffic to your site. Make a premium member forum section and give normal membersthe chance to get this premium membership for free if they start referring traffic to your site.

10. Use a clean nice design for your niche! When you start a forum layout is very important. You need to know your target audience and make your layout according this. Don't use flashy stuff though since this is proofed not to work efficiantly.

This are my 10 tips of generating traffic to your forum. I hope you people got some usefull tips here and I would love to here your feedback!

All the best,
Amro