Keep up the good work.

Thanks,

Greg

You are right though, don’t go into the Internet game unless you are prepared to spend a considerable amount of time there posting, obtaining links, and writing articles. If it were easy everyone would be successful.

Suggestion to newbies: Try to see if you can start a regular small bricks and mortar business to accompany your online efforts. If you are a photographer and start a forum, try to do some local photography and start marketing to people in your local communities on the Internet and by using standard marketing practices. This is one way of making a little money right off the bat while redirecting people to your forum that you actually know. Also, try to outsource some of this if you can and set goals. If you can do 10 posts a day and you put that goal over your computer your chances of survival will be greater.

Anyway, this post really confirmed everything i always thought about online marketing. Thanks so much for being honest.

God Bless!
ELMO

Regards,

Terry Greensill

The target is to have some posts every week or so. have new stuff.

Mind you, forums need a lot of work and time. And don’t monetize very well.

Regarding forum posts, I came across some software scrapers which will scrape and post the content to the new forum for initial activity and some old look. Does this concept works?

thanks

conversion chart

learnt = learned

It’s amazing how long a good article lives. What you wrote so long back is still as valid. I’m trying to setup a traveler’s forum at http://thetripmagic.com where people can post blogs, discuss travel ideas and network with other travelers. Also coming up would be flight search capabilities. Really appreciate your pointers.

My name is Gary, I just wanted to introduce myself since I am new to this site…

I am a rookie to the internet but I am learning alot real fasssst!

I’m a Hair-sample Matcher and devoted father.

The things I like most in life are family, friends and football.

On week days you’ll usually find me riding my bike. On the weekends I like to party and watch football.

My idea of the perfect day would start with sleeping in. And then I’d go to the park. Later I’d eat a great dinner from uGO FlameDisk. And I’d top it all off by snuggling with my girlfriend.

I also love rap videos.

Anyways it’s great to be a part of your site!

Thanks

Another way of getting some members and posts initially is hiring people as forum posters. There are some forums at DigitalPoint where there is already a bit of a market going, lots of people who are keen to post in forums for cheap. A common price was 10 cents a post, and the buyer totally controls the terms – so if you want more members you could hire people to post 20 posts for 10 cents each. Or if you want a few members who have lots of posts – hire a set number of people to do a hundred posts and pay them after they have finished. I did this a few times as a poster (just for fun, not to get rich!) and I think in some cases people actually stayed on even though they were no longer getting paid, because they liked the forum. But anyway, it’s a way to get things going that doesn’t have to cost a lot.

Many Thanks again.

Just to add to Yaros great article, what I did with my forum was to throw a few bucks at the Google Adwords program.

I might have been lucky and found a niche market but the adwords saw a steady flow of visitors from which I got a reasonable amount of new members. The forum has been online for only a couple of months and has nearly 70 members, most of which come by regularly to see whats being said.

What I found too is that the more posts contributed to the forum by the members, the more hits from the search engines I’ve been getting. For instance, this happens more often then not if lets say, a Googler searches for something on Google and their search phrase just happens to match something written within the forum itself. Great stuff!

Even though it may be a result in the off-topic discussion forum, a hit is a hit and is something to point out when the time comes to solicit some outside advertising. I’m getting about 3 or 4 new members weekly just by users searching for something so I don’t have to use the adwords anymore.

I’ve also put the Google Adsense thingimyjig on the forum which is making enough to pay for the hosting.

The forum is only 2 or 3 months old and is growing steadily so if anyone is considering launching a new forum, I definitely recommend using Google Adwords along with the fake identities concept to market it initially. It also helps if you know a little SEO but if not, you’ll probably get enough hits from your threads to see some new fresh faces drop in on you.

Also, my forum is for Avon cosmetics so I could keep members coming back by offering them something for nothing. What I did was to let them post their own contact details on the forum so anyone who came by wanting to join Avon could contact them as their local sales rep directly. This was something out of the norm as beforehand, new Avon leads would be harvested by sales reps and sold to other sales reps in their local area. Proved to be a bit of a hit idea. I’m sure this idea could be altered to suit any theme/forum/niche as the concept is just the same.

What else I wanted to do was to require a minimum post count before these sales reps could post in this part of the forum, this way I’d have plenty of posts from members keen to solicit leads from the forum but PHPBB didnt have the feature (should have went vBulletin or InvisionPB) but PHPBB is free and you can upgrade to either of the latter later without losing your members/posts.

To close, I was spending only about £15/$30 per week for Adwords which I got about 150/170 targetted hits. If anyone is serious about getting their forum off the ground, I’d recommend this first ;o)

Thanks guys,

Hannah x