Populating a forum

[martinglover]

To get the people using your forum there obviously has to be content to keep people in there and reading it, encouraging people to post.

Aside from adding loads of pretend posts yourself, what are your preferred methods to get things started?

[Zoli]

I personally believe that the initial personal posting storm can't be avoided. It is great luck if you have nice and generous friends who have the willingness to participate in the communication and start their own threads. I launched only one forum so far so am not the most experienced forum owner on this board :)

[martinglover]

So what sort of amount of posts should be aimed for in a a posting storm? (I like that term!!)

[Zoli]

Well, when I launched my webmaster forum about 3 years ago with a friend of mine first off we designed the forum structure. We had webdesign, general chat and dedicated forums for the major search engines, like MSN (it was not called Bing that time). We could not leave any forum empty so started at least two topics in each section to make the talk going. Some of the first threads were hit and generated a lot of conversion but other were fails. But now we are having almost 10 000 threads I think our initial steps were correct.

[martinglover]

Interesting. So I guess its all about the content of things to be discussed and that is what makes it work. The traffic follows I guess.

[temi]

That is basically it Martin, good sensible useful, unique contents and traffic follows. I think it was Bill Gate who is supposed to have said "content is king" who ever said that is right, conten on any blog/forum or other information site is indeed king.

[mark joshef]

it is really interesting..unique content and traffic follows,, It is great luck if you have nice and generous friends who have the willingness to participate in the communication and start their own threads.....

[Wooly Worcester]

i agree with Temi, content needs to be something special and with a few knowledgeable posters to kick it off. Also making sure it is clear and easily navigable helps.

[neojiphre]

Make your forum active but not too much subforums

[fastreplies]

Make your forum active but not too much subforums

How is your advice helps OP and answers his question: how to get things started?

Next time please read what OP is asking and then post something useful.



fastreplies