How do you kickstart a community?

[cowcowcow]

Very few pple post on my fourms. In fact most of the posts on the forums are from me and my friends. My site gets 30+ new visitors from google everyday but still not many pple are bothered to post stuff, i think mostly coz they see not many pple are posting.

I thought of paying people to post on my fourms, but i cant even find good legitimate sites for that. The legitimate ones i found are extremely expensive like $50 for 100 posts or something. I even bought a bunch of community buidling books but they werent very helpful.

Does anyone know of good sites where to find paid posters? Or if you have any other ways to start your community please share them!

[halkum]

Interesting topic. Never thought of paying people to get some more post quickly.

[DeanLag]

Try to convert those visitors into registered users by building a relationship with them.
Reward users based on their activity. Mods such as vBExperience, vBCredits (Point system), Awards system, do get current users participate more and will also, possibly, help converting those guests into registered users.

If you're going to pay someone to post; might as well try to host reward-based events, depending on what your forums is about.
For example, if your forums is about cars - host an event called 'Post your picture of your car' and the best car, voted by your community, will receive a prize of $x. This will help creating your community and keep them.

Try a referal-based system as most 'friends of friends' will want to stay because they know someone on the site.

Also try limitting guest access. If your whole forum is viewable by guests, they won't have any incentive to register. Maybe show them the first post only or only the thread titles.

[ShawneyJ]

Originally Posted by cowcowcow

Does anyone know of good sites where to find paid posters? Or if you have any other ways to start your community please share them!

forums.digitalpoint.com

members there do this all the time.
if you were to pay people make sure you ask for members to post only threads, Content Unique.

$50 for 100 posts is a pretty good deal, but you could do this your self making your own content.

whats you forum about?

[DeanLag]

Eh $50 for 100 posts? I'd do that =p Unique content too!

[Charlie98902]

I host a software forum and we periodically give free serials to the software at times plus some other software not too expensive either. Then user are emailed to know about this contest and participate and invite their friends and family to join. This has done a nice job without getting spammers too. Other forums I visit do the same, but as mentioned depends on your site and what it has to offer. You want to be unique but at the same time kind of have some redundant sections like PC help for example. I don't get much on members but get around 70+ a day not counting visitors. My site is only 3-4 years old.

[ChopSuey]

Originally Posted by jaycob

forums.digitalpoint.com

I love that place, its really nice there. Never knew they had that service.

[porcupine73]

Hm does this make a possible scenario of 'post exchange'? i.e. person 1 posts 20 unique fresh posts on person 2's forum, and versa vice? It seems this would work primarily where person 1 has a forum s/he isn't really a subject matter expert on the topic of, but person 2 is. Man this is probably the most poorly expressed idea i've ever had.

[cowcowcow]

my budget is not that big.. i could afford 10cents per post or somethign and i wanna target nerdy school kids who have too much time and would be spending tons of time posting stuff on forums like 4chan anyway.

one of my sites is a gamign site the other is a poker site but these sites have general forums so shoudlnt be a prob.

jaycob do u knwo anymore links like that? love it

[kevcj]

Why not have a forum posting contest? Call some of your friends and family to see if they are interested. Maybe run an ad in the local news paper to announce the contest?