I could sure use some advice and help. My community (SubversionForum.com) has not gotten any attention and I know it's because I haven't given it enough attention. The primary issue is getting those first few members who will stick around, create content, and answer questions.

The only real thing I've done (again, my fault) is approach the various Subversion related mailing lists announcing my forums. Not much has happened with that.

The only members I'm seeing happen to be spam accounts. I've yet to delete them simply because it's nice to see the member list grow even if they don't post.

AdminFusion members, I'm begging you, what can I do to get my community kick started? I know because of the niche I won't see a huge daily amount of traffic, but I feel I can be _that_ place for Subversion help and so forth. Any advice is appreciated.

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Kill The Desktop - Weekly Technology Podcast

You need to work out your drawcard, ask yourself - Why should people come here? That question really helped me get my forums going.

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The keyword here is 'effort'. You reap what you sow. Have you tried submitting to major search engines too? Some SEO might help with that and of course, advertise your forums in your signature on every board you post on if they allow it. There's quite a lot you can do to get things moving.

Consider adding a blog to your forum so you can write posts about Subversion and it will provide some great content for the spiders

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There's just not enough going on in your forums...2 of the sections haven't had a single post in over a month - That's not good at all. If you are trying to get your brand new forum going and you've let an entire section go dry for a few days, let alone a month, then you're doing something wrong...Basically, if you're not posting, why do you expect your members to do it?

You need to get in there and start posting. Give your members a reason to come back...As of right now, if I were a potential member, why would I want to join?

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The target focus for this site is to get help on Subversion. I see the majority of traffic coming from people who need a quick question answered and will never come back again. For me, that's great. I want to get that history of questions and answers on the site as a good wealth of knowledge. If a certain forum doesn't get traffic for a month, that's OK really. It's not that I need to spam around in my forums to get people to post. I think the few genuine questions and answers that have shown up so far are exactly what I need on the site.

To answer your question, a potential member would want to join if they have a question and feel this site will answer it. I feel a select few would actually "hang around" and just shoot the shit.

Given these items, I think my target market is different than most. So my advertising methods should be different. I've got decent SEO going on simply because I'm using vBulletin. I get nearly all of my traffic from Google by people searching for threads we do have. I've posted to the various mailing lists that have people interested in Subversion. Of course those people are generally the last that need help. It's hard to find a good way to put myself in front of those people.

Sara, I like that idea. I'm strongly considering just building a QA system for the site. Something that is very well SEO focused and can accept submissions from the public. What do you think about that? In many ways it takes away from the purpose of the forums, but possibly I could link each "article" to a forum thread or something like that.

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Kill The Desktop - Weekly Technology Podcast

The problem still goes right back to the activity though. If I am a Subversion user and I'm looking for somewhere to ask a question, I'm not very likely to ask in your forums because I don't expect to receive an answer. Your forums do not look like an active question/answer session. So, what I'm going to do is keep searching for a forum where I'm sure to get an answer (ie: Subversion Forum - SVNForum.org).

You can be very willing and able to answer any questions that people throw at you, but first they've got to throw them at you. They are only going to do that if you can first convince them that their question will be answered...and just saying that somewhere in your forums is not going to be enough. You can't have empty/inactive forums like you do now. You need to fill them with posts - and replenish them daily. Prove to your visitors that your forums are active, and then the members *may* come. I say may because there is still much more to a forum's success.

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I find it helps to create ONE fake member and use it to populate your board. Sometimes I hate seeing a new board with only the admin's name in the last posted by field. Once your board has enough activity, you can merge the fake user into your admin account and you're done.

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I went to Vegas, and all I got was this Blister. - true story!

I dunno about that...doing that has the potential to seriously upset your members. Whenever you create fake accounts, you always run the risk of your members finding out, and if they do, that's not a good thing...They'll feel like they're being manipulated and they'll start to wonder whether or not the other members are genuine.

If you make a bunch of posts with your fake member, and then merge it into your admin account all of a sudden...What are you other members going to think? Surely they are going to notice that this fake member disappeared all of a sudden and all of the posts are now owned by the admin account.

I have never created a fake account myself, since I don't really believe in doing that when running a forum...but, the strategy can work if done correctly.

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I've also seen the fake member idea backfire big time on someone and it wasn't pretty. I have to agree with Ryan on this one, be very careful if you decide to create a fake member as you could get the opposite response.

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