[clp11479]

anyone have experience with driving forum traffic? if so, any hints? i run a blog and the blog does pretty good by itself:
Adbrite Statistics for my Blog
My blog is in the top tier of sites selling ads on Adbrite. But I cannot get people to go to the Forum. I tried running a contest and was giving away a free gift card and that did nothing. I have not put any ads in my Forum section and won't do so until it becomes highly traffic'd.

Any suggestions? I could do PPC with Adwords, but if people see an empty forum they won't stay. I could pay someone to post 50 times a day or something, but wouldn't that look sketchy if every post was from the same person?

[jasaunders]

AdBrite sucks! I used to use adbrite with my scrapbooking store/studio. The categories I picked were women and family. 95% of the ads AdBrite sent me, over 50 a day, were from some myspace website to make a profile. I think it was pimpmyprofile.com or something like that.
Please tell me how that has anything to do with women and family and scrapbooking!

You will have better luck with PPC. As far as people coming to an empty forum... you have to start by getting all your friends to join and post on there. And create a few different user names yourself and post various messages under different user names to make it look like there are real users.

[Bored]

IMO, a big reason as to why people join forums is because they want to reply to something. Ironically, you need to have forum activity in order to get more activity.

Try getting 10 or so friends to make at least one post a day for a month. Seeing all the activity people would naturally want to join in. Soon enough there will be enough activity to passively perpetuate it's own growth.

[john82]

Bored those are good point, also few valuable thread and useful posts make it popular since you can digg it through different social bookmarking sites. Overall Quality content is important.

[jessikalilly]

hi,
quality content is the most important factor

[Dale King]

Originally Posted by clp11479

anyone have experience with driving forum traffic? if so, any hints? i run a blog and the blog does pretty good by itself:
Adbrite Statistics for my Blog
My blog is in the top tier of sites selling ads on Adbrite. But I cannot get people to go to the Forum. I tried running a contest and was giving away a free gift card and that did nothing. I have not put any ads in my Forum section and won't do so until it becomes highly traffic'd.

Any suggestions? I could do PPC with Adwords, but if people see an empty forum they won't stay. I could pay someone to post 50 times a day or something, but wouldn't that look sketchy if every post was from the same person?

Believe it or not, you're actually doing things the right way. You started a blog first to gauge interest in your topic, added lots of useful, relevant content and built up your credibilty and traffic. Now you have to successfully transfer your blog readers over to your forum.

If your blog is good and relevant, word of mouth and organic SEO will take over and your forum will eventually grow that way. It would be a natural progression. Just make sure to mention your forum in every blog post you make. Whatever you do, don't make up fake accounts. People would see through that trick in a heartbeat, and you'd lose any credibility you built up.

The key of course is patience, because it takes time to build traffic this way. Sure you can try buying traffic announcing your forum. But I personally don't recommend that approach either, because buying forum traffic typically doesn't work - at least not over the long haul. Also giving people free gift cards to use your forum is definitely not the best way to go about building a loyal forum following. The only people you'll end up with will be forum freebie-seekers.

If you don't mind me asking, why do you want to create a forum anyway? Are you trying to build a community? Because you can actually build a blog community a heck of a lot easier and faster - considering the fact that you already have a successful blog.

Dale King

[Bored]

Originally Posted by Dale King

Believe it or not, you're actually doing things the right way. You started a blog first to gauge interest in your topic, added lots of useful, relevant content and built up your credibilty and traffic. Now you have to successfully transfer your blog readers over to your forum.
Dale King

There is no 'right way' to do it; the right way is whatever way that gets the job done (considering nobody gets hurt). Assuming there is a 'right way' may hinder his creativity.

[ADVERTISE HERE!]

Originally Posted by Bored

There is no 'right way' to do it; the right way is whatever way that gets the job done (considering nobody gets hurt). Assuming there is a 'right way' may hinder his creativity.

I agree. The "right" way is never suitable for all businesses. A thorough analysis of the business, its goals, its market, etc. will determine the "right" way.

[TheCDAllenGroup]

Creating and Monetizing an Online Forum/Message Board

[luemob]

one thing that i notice about forums is what can I get out of it, revenue sharing via adsense, tips and advice being given away (proxy site secrets) etc lure me to the forum. In this case it was john chow that referred here to YE. Since I know that he has a lot of visitors. I knew I can find an audience here. You might want to do the same, create a banner and do ads on other popular sites to create traffic. I think PPC would be a waste.