Interesting read. I'm still trying to figure out how I shuld promote my new site! :cool:

I own hollywoodsbest.net and I have almost 7thousand members with over 200K posts in less than a years time. That site is doing well on it's own, but I have trouble setting up new ones.

I just started my forum 2 months ago and it's now growing at a rate of 100 new members everyday. We receive lots of visitors daily, 500 members + lots of guests.

It takes more than a man to promote a forum, it takes patience and most important of all, you gotta keep your head straight.

I had a time when I almost sold the forum.

Remember, it's all numbers.

Well for www.gamerzplanet.net. It has about 22k unique visits a day..about currently about 63k members, and about 1.8k new members per day. and I guess a lot of them from googles. I didn't spend any money advertising the website at all..google is very important..

That's pretty good for a 2 month old forum. Where are the users coming from?

Christoph

It really depends on what your idea is for your site. If you start a computer-hardware or gaming forum the chances are it will not get big, well because theres about 2 million other computer-hardware and gaming forums out there. Your best bet is to open a forum that is pretty much untouched by any other forums. Its just like opening a business, if you open the same business as everyone else you will not make a lot of money cause its so spread out between all the other business like it, but if you do something different you will be successfull.

I started my first site less than 2 years ago and have 7k+ members I get about 7000 visitors a day. I actually took a different approach to growing my site. I had stickers made up with funny and somewhat offensive sayings on them with my web address on the bottom of it. I then took the stickers and put them on ebay and started selling them. I pay .10 a sticker and on average sell for $1 a sticker. Currently around the world there are over a thousands of stickers and over 3000 t-shirts.

I figure I make money and get free advertising. My large site is www.everything2stroke.com I just started www.everythingmx.com and www.everythingduners.com. I have 6 other sites that will be launched soon.

I used a hack to link my sites user tables so that all my users from my first site have access to my other sites. This eliminates having to grow a site from 0 users and allows current users to access all the sites with 1 username and password.

What tool or plugin are you using to run the referral contests?

how did you do that?