I have a website with over 10,000 UV a month, but my forum is not popular at all...

What are the best ways to make a forum popular? (Aside from ranking for the term on SE) - I'm talking non-SEO ways to populate a forum.

Thanks

The problem you have is.

You need people posting at the same time.

If you have friends, around 10 people who could post for the first week and drive traffic to it at this period.

No one will post on an inactive forum so you do need some way of making it active even if its paying for posts until it has enough real users.

You are right. That is my current problem.

I need to make it active. I'm just asking for suggestions on how

One way is to hire bunch of posters for couple month.

NIma

Nima,

that's indeed what you need to do; check http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ ... there are a lot of cheap offers to get posters, it's even shouldn't take a couple of months and that many posts.

but ... make sure that you're also on top of it yourself; delete crap, post really good responses etc yourself and so on ...

you can also give people incentives, $20 free gambling or so when achieving 100 posts, sure this will lead also to crap posts, but nobody will tell you that's it's easy to get it started ...

cheers,

Michiel

I think I will do that. Offer $20 to 20 people to get to 100 posts and we'll see how it goes, if it goes well, I will do it again for more posters

Thanks guys,

Ps. I submitted my deep link "poker forum" with you too for directories to rank higher. So we'll see how that goes too

I don't know that you need to pay professionals. Why not make an offer to the 10,000 UVs to your sites. Once they hit a certain number of quality posts, they receive something of value you have to offer.

Jason

I never thought of that

How many of the UVs are actually proxied spam bots? he he

I know a few folks that started forums over the last year... not going to well for most of them... we're old war horses stuck in 'Social Networking 1.0'

waaaaaahhhhhh..... I prefer forums to the 2.0 world myself.....

But if we were getting those 10k UVs into the forums and they were spam bots, he'd have a forum problem of a different sort. He said that he wasn't getting posts, not getting junk posts.

I still prefer forums to social networking sites and mailing lists. But, there are simply too many forums out there to support all the reading.

This is a great group, but I come in and out due to my busy reality.

Usually, the horrible reality and likelihood of an empty forum is not worth the potential upside of a busy forum. It's just too hard to get to in most cases. I always advise our member sites (who use our laser tag gear) not to do forums.

The website is www.pokereagles.com

I dont think much of the traffic is bots, but what do i know

Well, if it was Bots, you'd know it... because there would be posts... SpAM posts....

I would do 2 things;

1. Get some folks posting one way or another a mentioned.

2. Hit with some 'bait' titles and topics. Topics that will spark a lurker into participating. Start an arguement/discussion (nicely, no flaming) with one of your mates (or even yourself, create another user) about something to get them in. Maybe start a thread like;

Helmuth Rocks - Hanson sucks

then argue with yourself as to why one is better than the other......

I work with the owner of a forum and we are always talking about ways to increase the participation level. To raise the lurker : poster ratios....

I don't think you can make a forum good unless you put in the effort yuorself... It takes hard work, and unless you enjoy it, don't even bother...