I've been running my forum for over a year now and its still not as active as I would like. I'm putting a lot of effort into the forum (which is fine since its my hobby). But its hard to feel like I'm getting somewhere. I think what my forum needs is a bit of activity so when new members join, they stick around.

I see a lot of forum owners who have this problem so I figured there must be a way for us to help each other out. So what I propose is a 'Forum Squad' of say 6 forum owners who sign up to each others forums and create 1 thread and 5 posts or so a week in the other forums. They end up helping the other forum owners and in return the other forum owners post on there website.

Hey Presto - instant activity.

So I need 5 other forum owners who would like to have a go to PM me and I will keep you posted on how it goes.

Cheers Steve

The way that I got started with DaniWeb was that I personally responded to every single post that anyone made within 12-24 hours of it being posted. It almost didn't matter that the site was completely empty as long as the people who did come got instant satisfaction. That's what made them come back and tell their friends.

To get active your forums is to promote it through forum also and informed about your forum on which they can participate and share their opinions.

Starting good thread and your own thread participation is important to grow the community, also time to time offer some contest and reward your valuable contributors.

Yup, it's a good idea to constantly seed the forums with posts that can get conversations flowing.

Also try to wake up the inactive members of your forum by sending them personalized mail about anything new that you added in forum, they will start coming back to your forum.

Yes, thats a great piece of advice.

hi

Some time back, as I was approached by some forum owners asking to post on their forums.. like about 2000 posts a month.. so it seemed like organic visitors. And then I continued it advertising in forums, blogs, articles, squidoo etc. Then he is getting decent visitors now and the things are going quite well now..

Steve

Nice to know that beamup that you continue advertising in forum. You should also try the social bookmarking, social community and the social media site like Myspace.

Yes guinanie, I have been doing Social bookmarking, myspace too. They have proved very successful. But I havent tried Squidoo.
Have you tired it??

Steve