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:

[sebbe]

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

[Andromeda2875]

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.

[Tacama]

I agree with most of the thread replys. It takes time, good contents, etc., but content is always the main reason for forum users to register...

I've found something weird. How are web crawlers supposed to know what are your forum contents if you don't give them a little peak at least?

My 2 cents of advice. Keep one of your subforums open for visitors so they get an idea of what they may find inside.

Good Luck

[almukmin]

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.

[Skyline_GT]

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..

[nsusa]

Originally Posted by almukmin

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.

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

Christoph

[hawk16]

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.

[e2s]

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.

[cgchris99]

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

[MissKalunji]

Originally Posted by e2s

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.

how did you do that?