[Will.Spencer]

I just looked through the last six pages of threads in this category.

In summary, here are the suggestions people posted for getting members to join your forum:

• Blog Commenting
• Signature links
• Sponsorships
• Link exchanges
• Link baiting
• Asking for reviews
• SEO
• PPC
• Contests
• StumbleUpon
• Interviews
• Facebook advertising
• Digg

[Moelman]

Excellent summary Will, should be very helpful!

[Will.Spencer]

At NetBuilders, we've tried a bunch of these to get the forum jumpstarted in a super-competitive niche.

Reviews of the forum on webmaster blogs performed poorly in terms of clickthroughs -- except for the review on JimKarter's blog. That one review did really well for us.

Blog comments performed almost as well as reviews -- when they were made on super-relevant blog posts.

Signature links on other forums have worked pretty well for us, but that may be related to the fact that a lot of members on those forums are disgruntled.

We've run one contest so far and it didn't do anything for attracting new members -- because we haven't figured out how to promote contests outside of the forum.

I don't see SEO as a good method for building community sites, and only a small percentage of our traffic comes from search engines. Nevertheless, we have done some link building to improve site performance in that area.

We have not tried PPC. Using AdWords Site Targeting to place ads on competing forums does seem like an amusing idea.

Facebook has some super-targeted advertising possibilities, but we haven't tried those yet.

Digg didn't do much for us, but we didn't try hard to reach the front page. We will have to revisit that. We haven't tried StumbleUpon yet, but I have always had better results from SU than from Digg.

We haven't tried doing interviews yet. We've thought more about doing interviews to highlight some of our awesome, but fairly quiet, members.

Regarding sponsorships, I'm not sure who we would sponsor and for what.

Mostly, what has really worked for us has been word of mouth. Our membership is very happy with the forum and they have been promoting it pretty well. In addition, I've been directly contacting individuals I would like to become members of the community. That strategy is very time consuming, but it works well.

NetBuilders is less than two and a half months old and has already grown to 841 members, 1,456 threads, and 12,398 posts.

We're in what is possibly the most competitive forum niche in existence. It's going to be a long hard climb to the top.

[Moelman]

Very impressive numbers though for such a young forum in the niche you are in. Something is definitely working for you.

[Chris Suyeda]

Impressive numbers! And I thought I was doing well... 5 days in and we're at 100 threads and 600 replies. Now I am discouraged. Thanks a lot.

... only kidding. Wish you the best!

[Will.Spencer]

Originally Posted by Chris Suyeda

And I thought I was doing well... 5 days in and we're at 100 threads and 600 replies.

Those are awesome numbers man!

[Mark Raven]

Great post! I've actually been going through pages of threads myself, but it's handy to see it all compiled like his.

Blog comments performed almost as well as reviews -- when they were made on super-relevant blog posts.

I'd be curious to know more about how you did this (or how other people do it). Were the blog comments particularly long/informative? Did you mention your site somewhere in the comment? Did you post under your name or your site's name?

In addition, I've been directly contacting individuals I would like to become members of the community. That strategy is very time consuming, but it works well.

Any tips for doing this? Do you mostly find people to ask through their blogs/websites? It sounds like an interesting idea to try, but I'm not 100% sure how I would find people to ask in my niche. And I think I would have to make my request fairly long, well thought-out and personalized for it to not seem like spam.

[rockinaway]

Some great stuff there, from everyone. It was mentioned, that you are not sure where to advertise your contests. Well there are several other forums and websites that list contests e.g. DigitalPoint. I guess, that would be a good place to start.

[Will.Spencer]

Originally Posted by Mark Raven

I'd be curious to know more about how you did this (or how other people do it). Were the blog comments particularly long/informative? Did you mention your site somewhere in the comment? Did you post under your name or your site's name?

The blog comments which worked well were on topics very closely related to our forum.

A lot of them were topics complaining about the current #1 forum in our niche.

I posted under my own name and mentioned our forum in the comments.

Originally Posted by Mark Raven

Any tips for doing this? Do you mostly find people to ask through their blogs/websites? It sounds like an interesting idea to try, but I'm not 100% sure how I would find people to ask in my niche. And I think I would have to make my request fairly long, well thought-out and personalized for it to not seem like spam.

This worked well for me, because I know (and am known) by an enormous number of people in our forums niche.

I looked at other forums in the same niche and sent emails to the people I recognized.

For most of the emails, I started with a template and added in their forum nicknames to let them know it wasn't random spam.

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