Luckily, forums work well with viral marketing and word of mouth marketing (WOM). The reason for this is because they are already deep in the heart of online community building, which is what online viral marketing is all about. Sites get mentioned in other forums, in blogs, in newsgroups ... in other communities. Eventually word spreads pretty quickly among online cliques and networks. Most forum goers participate in multiple forums on a same topic, so much of the community remains the same between sites. Did that make any sense at all?

Right, it is network-enhanced word of mouth, IMO it should carry the central sales message and tailored to your target audience, even on SE point of view it improve link popularity.

There is no magical solution to have your forums run with many members. For the new forum admins it's indeed frustrating. You open a forum and expect people to flood it. Well, they don't. This is why a forum admin needs to work a LOT: from skinning to modding the script and creating new interesting threads each day. There are some "faster" options too: pay for advertising, pay for posts or use some post exchanges. In the end only time and HARD work will make the difference.

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Ostriches don't bury their heads in the sand. They merely lower their heads. Hard work for me is smart work using own intelligence.

how would one go about enlarging a new forum like wiipros that offers a coin incentive that can be redeemed for stuff and a referral system

http://www.wiipros.co.uk/index.php referrer dogbone27

That was tricky, dogbone27!

For a forum you will need to have fresh and new treads on a daily basis so you can encourage people to join and ceep coming back to your forum.

Also a forum that looks nice also does make people join and stay on a forum.

I too am looking for ways to improve a forum. I have a great idea (at least I think) I just really dont know how to make the site look good, or advertise to make it a good strong forum. any suggestions would be helpful. feel free to PM me!!

Yeah, I would agree that this is the main thing that keeps me going back to a forum. If there are several new topics popping up daily, it's a sign that the forum is healthy and intelligent (well, as long as the topics are intelligent).

Now, you can't create new threads all the time though--much of that has to emerge from your members. So I would say do what you can to encourage the active members to stay active.