How do you usually raise your forum when it's brand new? How to you promote it, attract new members, and get the traffic you want? Share your methods, ideas, tips, and secrets here on how to get a brand new forum off the ground.

Here are some ways that I personally find to be affective:

1. Promote your forum on other forums - Put your forum link in your signature, and promote your forum in a thread made just for it. Make sure you post in the right forum and it's not braking any advertisement rules.

2. Create a "waiting list" - Tell people about your forum, give them sneak peaks, and convince them it will be a good community BEFORE you show it to the public. Now, when your forum goes live you will have people waiting to join immediately.

3. Submit to directories and get on Google - It never hurts to list your forum on as many directories as you can. And it's a good idea to get your forum on Google right away.

4. Forums don't post themselves - Don't be afraid to post "starter" threads throughout your forum. This will give guests a reason to join. Not many people will want to join a forum with no posts. Get some rules, sticky threads, and welcome posts.

5. Make the forum unique - Think to yourself "Why is someone going to want to join my forum rather than competing forums?" Make your forum unique and different. Look at the competition and figure out what they are lacking. Get ideas from them and then make it better in your own, unique way.

I could go on forever with small tips like these that will help get started with your forum but I want to hear some other members' methods too.

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I'd also like to know what your opinions are on "dummy" accounts. What do you think of making fake accounts on your new forums to make it look like an active forum to give a reason for people to join. Would you rather do that over making lots of posts on your real account and have 100 out of the forum's 120 posts? Or would you rather have about 10 accounts with about 10 posts each to make it look like there are good discussions at your forum?

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-Foxx
Major vBulletin Fan... Nothing Else.
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Hey,

i've never tried #2 - though I suppose it would work, in theory, if what you have is something unique. Also a good idea would be to collect emails and email them once it goes live.

#5 is the most important. Equally important, however, is having it active - or at least appearing so. I don't like dummy accounts, though I've used them on most of the forum's I've started from scratch. however, it's always better to have friends post or do post exchanges instead.

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Creative Writing|My Blog

I like the sound of number two. I imagine it'll work especially well if you have another forum or if you're a highly respected member of one. I've used a few dummy accounts to get the forum off the ground, as it is highly unusual for members to just talk with the admin. Since I've grown, I've stopped using the dummies unless the forums are unhealthily inactive.

As for my own tips... well, you've pretty much covered it. Blog comments are good for building link popularity, but don't spam.

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I honestly don't think that #2 is a very good idea for most forums...In fact, I could see it hurting the launch of your forum. That "waiting list" or "anticipation" strategy really only works for extremely unique and sought after ideas/tools. If you're just opening up another forum (even if it is special in some regard), but you play it up like the best thing since sliced bread, then people are going to get tired of waiting and then say something like this when you do open it - "Wait, this is just another forum?".

Instead of playing mind games with them, I say to focus on building the forum itself, and once it is ready, then promote. People just aren't going to get excited over a forum they can't see. Forums are not that exciting or anticipated

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...some super-sweet signature

When I first opened up my forum I had a small staff but I made sure myself and the other staff made as many threads as possible so it made the forum seem active and people would stick around and activity would climb onto that and it ended up working and now I'm finally at the point now where most my members are comfortable in making starter threads which is rare and which is very important. So, yes, number #4 is very very important.

But, I'd also agree with the others who said #5 was more important because it is. If you simply can't answer that question then you better think back and get an answer together so you don't look an idiot and your forum dies.