Forum promotion with AdWords?

[Dani]

Is it possible to promote a new forum with AdWords? Is it possible to word the ads cleverly enough that people will overlook the new emptyness of it all and still register/post?

My current strategy = Massive SEO work to get new threads indexed and highly ranked. This sends LOTS of users to individual thread pages from Google, but they're 99% lurkers and leave after reading the requested page.

For fresh forum blood, I invest in AdWords directed towards my navigational pages (such as the forum index and category pages). With no real content, Google isn't going to rank these pages very highly even if there is a link directly to them from Google's homepage. However, they make the best landing pages, and users who find these pages early on have a high tendancy to register. Therefore, it pays to actually pay to send traffic to these pages for fresh member blood even though we get so much traffic for free through the SERPS.

Now my question ... I want to massively promote this Site Management category, which hasn't exactly been up to par lately. Where do I turn first?

[jonhel]

It's somewhat of a catch 22 isn't it! You need the participation but people don't feel motivated to participate in a forum that looks too quiet.

From personal experience this is a very difficult obstacle to overcome. I'm new here so haven't had the opportunity to look thoroughly throughout the site yet, but could you tailor content more to this area in the Site Management Blog that I see linked in Related Features?

Jonathan

[Dani]

In getting started when my forum was new, one of the main things that I tried to do was respond to every single poster within a couple of hours. I found that users didn't always mind that the site was empty as long as THEY had someone to talk to and THEY were being heard. That's what got them to come back with their friends. Eventually you do reach that critical mass.

This thread was created because I spent half of today in AdWords trying to drive traffic to the Site Management category, one of the categories here which gets hardly any traffic (at least compared to others). The Site Management blog definitely leaves a lot to be desired as well ... It's a community-based blog so you can actually contribute to it by visiting our blog section.

[ithelp]

Try pay per lead campaign , pay only if someone joins your forum.

[Dani]

Easier said than done :) Where could I go to purchase such a campaign without a five figure budget? Unless I were to set up a DaniWeb affiliate program of sorts myself :)