Best thing you did to make your forum grow?
 

What was the best tool/marketing angle/tip/trick/mod you used to make your board grow the most?

just curious

thanks!

Best thing i did is register with google webmasters and use their services and using a few seo tools on the forum.

Fertiliser.

Rapscallion

Write valuable content that people want to link to. Seemples.

Video blogging on youtube is maybe the best thing I ever did to promote my forum.

29 months later, my channel has 280+ videos, around 10,000 subscribers and youtube is my #2 source of targeted traffic with around an 18% - 23% bounce rate.

diversity ,,,,

well had a following already from a forum we all used to go on and it kinda took off :D

Networking Facebook :)

Jacquii.

spamming like forums.

Without a doubt, making it easier to post.

I still had enabled the anti-spambot "Click Quick Reply Button Above" thing.
So I removed that (so people can just write and click post).

The other thing, was smilies:
1st, changed the smilies from the right side, to the bottom.
2nd, changed the smilies displayed from the first 30 on the list, to 30 random ones.

That pretty much did it.
Of course, I have under 500 users.... so YMMV
:)

SEO + networking imho, but I'm only a beginner at forum management :)

seo + quality content ;)

the only thing that will make your site grow is having fresh content on a daily basis ... and, I don't mean just posts (posts usually have no 'meat' to them) ... I recommend articles, reviews, and blogs...

without them - it wouldn't matter how much money or time you spend on advertising, seo, networking, etc

Spamming other forums... lol just joking haha.
I installed facebook_connect and have since been adding content to my facebook page which has gotten more people coming to my website.

I am in the merge of making my forum grow, but cant seem to do it.

Don't have too many forum sections, be quite general.

Computer Hardware. instead of Graphics Cards. Processors. Memory sections.

There's nothing worse than a huge list of forums each with < 10 topics in.

We opened the Flame Warzone, basically it's no holds barred mayhem in there. There's a warning if you're in there be prepared to get flamed. It's fun for the member that like that stuff, and it keeps the rest of our board nice and friendly.

It's all about having a good strong community feel. Don't have power hungry mod's, and let guests view, restricting forums will just make people move on.

all good advice craig.

Built it lol

We are presently running a little experiment on a new site we've setup. It's just six of us total on the team. We just started with a basic VB install with vbAdvanced and VBSEO. Right now, we're just posting some content relevant to the area that the board covers.

All of us have experience or are current mods/admins at a couple of large VB sites. So, we're going to play with the board and see at what point does the traffic begin to really pick-up. We're monitoring raw server logs and also Google Analytics. (no advertising on the board at all, for now.)

That YouTube idea really hit a chord with our team, so we are going to look at what we could do with YouTube to help promote what we are doing.

Our direct compeition is laden with advertising with 35% of the right side of the screen filled with ads. But, they are owned by a local media company and have some good content for their main page. (forum is VB) Their forum is also very heavily censored, mainly to please the advertisers and the controlling owners. We offer more 'adult' oriented sections that are very popular where we are, we expect that to be a large attraction point for maybe 40% of potential users. (it's not graphic, just reviews of adult places such as bars/pubs and some more deeper nightlife activities.)

Well, I can follow up in a few months to see how things go. The site has only been up for about two months. We currently have about ~15 unique visitors per day.

Summary of tools we are using as of now:

- Google Analytics
- Google Webmaster Tools
- vBulletin 3.8 (w/ VBESO & vBAdvanced)
- A few useful vb.org plugins
- Raw web server log tracking
- No Advertising on the forum -OR- advertising for our forum on other sites.

We are anxious to see VB4. That may change our direction a little.

EDIT: Just a quick note; I'm not posting the URL to avoid contamination of the experiment results. We do want the site to flourish, but in due time. :D

EtherNetFreak your test is completely redundant as you have several variables overlapping each other. You have natural site growth, natural search engine traffic, supposed vBSEO-induced search engine traffic, and you are posting quality content.

To conduct a reasonable scientific tests you'd need to isolate your variables and create three identical sites, on three different domains (and servers) and post your quality content on one, do nothing on the other, and install vBSEO on the other. Even then you could argue that vBSEO traffic is just natural organic search traffic.

The fact of the matter is, it's almost impossible to prove a certain factor has any bearing on your sites growth, other than content. After all, that is what people come for on the internet :)

Indeed, I understand your point. However, we are tracking every click and link coming from somewhere else. When we add a new post or review, we watch to see what happens with that post or thread.

The experiment strictly revolves around search engine sourcing and word-of-mouth. As far as VBSEO goes, on another site I own, we've already shown that VBSEO improved the hit rate from people searching on Google. However, those people usually got what they were looking for and either bookmarked it or copy-n-pasted it somewhere else. It did not improve registration rate. (This site has about 90,000 posts, 130 active users and close to 2,000,000 hits per month)

We're not after truly scientific results, it's just one experiment using all of our combined forum experience to see where things go with barebones marketing & content production. We want the people that make it to our site to have come from a reference (friend/shared link) or simply a search engine. Right now, if you Google two specific words, our site pops up first on the list about 80% of the time. So, we shall see how it goes... :)

I understand what you're saying EtherNet but an experiment is useless if you cannot measure the effect of a single variable. You are effectively trying to measure one variable (search marketing) when in fact you're measuring several. I would take your results with a pinch of salt ;)

I opened my site 2 months ago, but so far the method that I saw that gained users was advertising on www.omegle.com (lol).

I'm currently trying to affiliate with other forums, if you're interested PM me ;)

interesting thread i'll post my finding later on

I always found that annoying people until they gave in worked to a certain extent...

I'de say having a proper design, attractive enough and fast loading...New visitors will leave as quickly as they came if your site takes too long too load.

BINGO!

If your not dedicated to YOUR forum and your mind is elsewhere then it simply won't work, you have to be in control of your forum and (this word will sound bad but used to for good lol) EXPLOIT your niche to the point of exhaustion but do not overwhelm your members :D The one thing is to always improve your forum while providing content your members simply can't get anywhere else OR better content but always remember the masses do not like change that much.

S-MAN

Moved from IPB to vB lol seriously the best move i ever made regarding my forums. ;)

See really there is no mod in this world will make guests look at to your forum
But you can try these stuff : -

1. Get your Forum Unique, even if not better but make it unique
2. be proper in general, and make your forum to the point , don't include off-topic sections or forums
3. get unique content , be the first to get the content
4. Do not try to copy other forums or give them new features just because your competitors have them installed
5. Create a New Design for your forum.
6. get seo content , vbseo and sitemap will help you in that

any forum software can be good lol
even the most big forums are of phpbb , so software does not matter

the thing which matters is how you manage it !!!

Same :)

Extenze...

ROFLMAO!!!!!!!!!! That was just hilarious LOL
So...... You have any pictures? https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2011/08/2.gif

Jacquii.