Not sure best place to ask this question but here goes.

I am a keen guitarist who has started my own website to help others and share info hence why I joined this forum to get help with my site.

I recently had an idea to ask another guitar forum to put in a beginners section and they basically said no "why don't you start one yourself".

I have as there are not very many beginners guitar forums outh there that in my opinion are very good. (only one and its not bad but could be better)

My question is how to you go about getting members as I would imagine that anyone looking in at the strt will think the forum is pretty poor with only 6 members. I have been PM'ing others I know from the guitar forums I'm in for support but is this the only way.

Cheers

We did recently started a career forum and it was very slow to take off as nobody really wants to join the forum with no members and no posts in it. We did some cross website promotions and also used social media contact to get the fist sign ups.

I would suggest you to find guitar or music related blogs, forum and websites and try to promote your forum that way. Also you should maybe create some members yourself and start some threads just to get tings going.

Hi there

The problem with forums, is you need a lot of traffic to be able to run a decent one, or a good 10 good posters to get a good forum going.

A lot of people make the mistake of adding a forum to their site far too early, it might be a good idea to just do a blog, and once you get ur traffic up and running think about adding a forum then.

As when people see you forum is dead and no ones using it they will just leave, unless you post every day yourself, which can be hard to keep up

Woc

Originally Posted by usearchme

Hi there

The problem with forums, is you need a lot of traffic to be able to run a decent one, or a good 10 good posters to get a good forum going.

A lot of people make the mistake of adding a forum to their site far too early, it might be a good idea to just do a blog, and once you get ur traffic up and running think about adding a forum then.

As when people see you forum is dead and no ones using it they will just leave, unless you post every day yourself, which can be hard to keep up

Woc

I agree. I believe first time you will need to pay them for the posting

Pay them to post? Like a professional forum poster? How cool is that!

pay to post? its a hobby and an interest.

So far I've just asked for help from other members I know from different forums. Got 10 members in a few days and aking them to tell other members they know. I will also add a few of my own members and stick some posts up each day just to see how it goes.

Thanks for the advice so far any other ideas would be welcome.

I would suggest to hire paid posters in the starting days to make the site look more active...
This is what i prefer to do...

There's millions of people out there who want to learn guitar, so the market is huge.

If you can get a domain name with all the right keywords in it, you may eventually rank well in the search engines, and that would greatly help with member sign ups.

If you require quality posts so you have to hire some web masters who will participate in forums. Once your forum will get popular you do not need to pay any one.