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:

[AdminNation]

Originally Posted by ZIKI-SET

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!

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

[alex905]

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

[misticjeff]

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

[pcoskat]

Originally Posted by misticjeff

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.

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.

[AKapadia]

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..

[pcoskat]

50-130 new ragister everyday?!??!

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

[Ziki]

Originally Posted by Lee

Define "lots of visitors".

150 visitors a day

[AKapadia]

Originally Posted by ZIKI-SET

150 visitors a day

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

[trytobecool]

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

[kurtbarker]

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.