SEM Tycoon

**Hobbit** · 08-01-2006, 12:30 AM

My site has been alive since May, yet only 31 people are active, which is pretty sad. I have 700 registered users, most of these people just register to vote (as a favor for their friends), or they are a band entering the weekly contest (www.bandoftheweek.com ).

How can I get more people to post? Only very few bands have actually stayed and enjoyed the community. I'm simply running out of ideas on how to make them post. Here are some of my recent ideas, please help me out with more.

- contest(not sure what it will be yet)
- bands with +15 posts get a spot on the homepage as 'featured band.'

This if my first forum so I'm not really sure what I can do to encourage people. My site doesn't even have ads so that can't be scaring them away. It's just really frustrating that hundreds of dollars are going into this site (hosting +vbulletin) and there's not much action going on.

**Tran** · 08-01-2006, 12:39 AM

You can't really get people to post. Maybe provide a contest like it looks like you're thinking of.. Other than that I really have no idea..

**Hoang** · 08-01-2006, 12:42 AM

Create some private forums with exclusive downloads or something. Users have to post X amount before they're allowed access to it.

It worked quite well for my first music forum and then when I had enough casual posters and members, I opened up the private forums to everybody and it's been growing at a pretty fast rate ever since.

**Lpspider** · 08-01-2006, 12:59 AM

Make it look active. Then send out a email/band to them all and see if you can slower recontruct the past activity.

**Hobbit** · 08-01-2006, 03:48 AM

I like the private forum idea, I actually do have one but it's completely invisible, so guests don't even know it exists. I also haven't given any promotion to it. Do you think interviewing bands in a good method to getting more posters? Well, if the interviews are in the private forum. Or maybe just SOME of the questions in the interview should be for the private forum.

**imported_lyndonw** · 08-01-2006, 04:49 AM

I've got exactly the same problem, I've got a new(ish) forum, loads of people registering but no posts! In fact I've got more than twice the number of members than new threads!!!!!!

I'm thinking about a contest and marketing at the moment, Im not really into paid posting and would hate to go down that route, but with these poor stats I might just have to....

**imported_Luke** · 08-01-2006, 05:09 AM

You have to offer your members an incentive! Something I found worked well was restrict access to a "offers" forum but make it so Guests and members can see it exsists. In this forum you should post many free offers that are available around the internet, things like "Free Sim Cards" etc, I used to find loads of em. Your members will post to reach the post count level to be able to access the forum just to get access to these offers.

Worked very well for me

**imported_illusion** · 08-01-2006, 05:16 AM

Why not consider posting yourself or creating your own content

I mean come on if you have more members than posts, there shouldn't be any shame in you posting like a crazy man

**handsome rob** · 08-01-2006, 11:56 AM

Have some friends post some controversial stuff. Don't necessarily have to trash the bands on the site, but I ended up registering for so many political forums back in 2004 just to BLAST some of the people who were posting.