This is an old article that I wrote, not sure how good it is now:
Yes, I know how hard it is to jumpstart a new community, but the key to a successful forum is to: post exchange with other webmasters, tell your friends, spread flyers, get everyone over there.
How do you do that, though?
It's easy, just meet other webmasters, who run a forum, just like you, and maybe they'll give you tips, or get some of their members over to help you.
Another key is to never ever hire people to post on your forum because they are, quite often, only interested in the money, and will probably not come back to your community.
On another note; do make a bunch of interesting threads, so that you can attract more members.
Also, when your forum is new to the world wide web (the internet), do not start off with a bunch of forums, 3-4 is fine, but 10-20 is not.
Visitors will not, most often, join a forum that does not have any activity, if you're going to open a new forum, just don't spam other forums because that is wrong, and quite often, will give your forum/community a bad reputation.
Would you want to be known on the web as a 'spammer'? If that's the case, then go ahead, spam other sites, but if you're like me, and like to promote the right way, then thanks for reading this article, however, it is yet to be finished.
A great way to promote your forum is to post on other forums, where allowed, and ask them if they could help you promote, and if they say yes, then welcome your first members.
It is very hard to grow from the first 5 members to over 100, it takes time, and patience, to grow that much.
You cannot expect your forum to grow over 100 members in a day, it is not possible, unless you have a myspace account, with over 100+ friends or something, but that is beside the point that I'm trying to get across.
Basically if you start a new forum, get some friends, get posting, and in a few days, I am sure that your community will have other posters, besides you and your friends, it's the key to success man!
This article was written by Cpvr, it may not be reproduced without his permission.
For more articles by Cpvr, be sure to check out his site
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