advertising and promotion how to become big?
 

We have a lot of people here who have succeful forums so these are the minds I want to pick.... do you have a advertising budget? is it just word of mouth? incentives to your users to get referals or what?

how do you go from small time to big time?

if you have some success stories that would be great also...

thank you for sharing....

:banana:

I could go on and on (and often do :D)...

I would say it takes time, hard work, great content, and most importantly you need to give your members some reason to share the site with others.

specifics?

I proably spelled that wrong

I think great content and great staff are the two most important aspects.

One of my forums is on it's way to becoming "big". We have been open for almost 6 months and have not advertised in the traditional sense of the word. My best success has been user's advertising in their sigs on other large forums and if you look at the attached, we had an incentive based referral contest in November 05. Those numbers would be bigger but I delete accounts that are not confirmed via the email within 7 days to weed out the crap. At this point the "User Activity" stats are very close to 4,000 different registered users logging in daily.

wow..... I was thinking about a referal incentive and I did one for about $25 in one month and nothing came of it..... higher stakes?

Word of mouth is and has always been the best way to promote a site.

(i.e. MySpace)

With the forum world being as big as it is, a $25 prize is nothing. It might make loyal users a little more inspired to promote the board, but a price like that won't have any profound affect.

Lol Yeah I have such an problem too.I am listed in 15 search engines,and get lots a visitors a day but no one registers!

Define "lots of visitors".

I would have to agree with most of the responses.

- Time
- Good Content for not only members but also a reason for sponsor to want to sponsor.
- Well designed and moderated site
- 0%-1% downtime
- Heavy traffic with many members
- Sponsor benefits
- Member incentives

My site is about 2.5 years old over 3,000 members and almost 30 sponsors and 100 premium member upgrades.

Right, and that's because of the impression your site conveys upon visitors.

i get most of my visitors by me a a few members showing outr content on other sites and we get 10000 hits a day and about 7 regs but im all the months we have been open we have only had 1 poster and not one ssingle person pout of the 1200 memebrs posted. so i would say that apart from posting lots of good stuff make a board that people want to get involved in

Not sure what I want to say but here goes....

I own and operate www.misticriver.net it is now the largest iriver mp3 player community on the net. I started it out of necessity for information in Nov. 03 and it has now grown to 28,000+ members, listed in the top ten of google searches for "iriver".

2005:
over 1.7 million unique visitors
over 62 million page views
over 280 million hits
over 1,920 gigs of bandwidth

Strong content and good moderation are the keys to get things started in my opinion. You also need content that folks want and need. Very hard to start a community without solid content.

For advertising, start with google ads right away. Free, easy and can bring in a fair amount of funding.

I have a subscriber user group on my site and run contests for them only. The cost to become a subscriber is only $12US for one year. Funny enough I only have 108 subscribers!! I'm currently running a contest giving away two iriver mp3 players worth a total of over $500US. You can of course start smaller which I did in the beginning.

Time, time, time... it just takes time and a lot of hard work.

Oh yeah... and install the Welcome Headers Hack. It really helped on my site.
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=99579

Jeff

Yours should be a model for building a great community:

A VERY specific topic which super-serves a very specific community. The purpose of the board is crystal clear when a new visitor arrives, and information (which is plentiful) is easy to find.

I found your board when researching the purchase of an iRiver. Your board was VERY helpful when it came to my decision (I got an iRiver AND an iPod Video ;) )

9 times out of 10, I 'arrive' at a message board via Google because I'm looking for INFORMATION...not new friends. Content is [still] king.

Excellent, excellent, excellent!

Personally, I think most board owners make their topic too broad, and it dilutes their potential audience.

nice topic.. i was wondering how can we submit site in search engine.. well but my site is doing good right now. i run my site based on Indian Tv shows and i start site in Nov -11- 2005 and so far got 8000 + members and might be finish 10,000 in next month i get 50-130 new ragister everyday.. i think to make forum popular big thing is work hard. on site if someone come.. he can find anything he want.. I.e. for kids we have cartoons, Womans we have Indian Darama, mans we have sports, movies.. so work hard and make forum look good from out side..

50-130 new ragister everyday?!??!

That's a LOT! Are you sure you're not already in the SE's?

150 visitors a day

I get around 1300 daily uniqe visiter and 125,000 view per day.

200+ register per day and 13000 unique members out if 30K total:p

i started my forum in early december 2005, nd have 150 registered members [alot of inactive accounts have been deleted, I don't believe in advertising 10,000 members when only 200 are active...

I would say we get 1 new registration every 1 to 2 days, and i'm happy with that, 15 new registrations a month isn't all that bad, so I think that we are growing, and will continue to...

so long as you have dedicated member who will post no matter what, then guests will continue to register.

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?

Hi!

Are you using a MOD to share the user database between multiple forums? Or did you custom build a solution for it?

Best Regards,
Adult SEO

Yeah I have 1 site that I started 2 years ago but wanted to expand but didn't want to start from scratch and the last thing my current members would want to do is register on another site. So I modded the VB code to allow me to use the User Tables and PM Tables from the Master site basically creating a slave site.

I have the instructions posted here

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=118473

Good luck and I hope it helps you out.

Thanks!