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.