Starting a new forum, need advice 0 capital

[salocharly]

hi everyone I am just staring a new forum and .info site, I am on the anxiety niche I have good knowledge on the matter and I suffered from it my self so i know when my target user is coming.

the first thing I check before signing a up to a forum is the quantity of users and post there is into it if i see is very little i just look for a bigger one, so my question is how do i get started with my forum?? how can i get people to join even if it is a new thing, is a good idea to fake the member numbers and tread quantity and just "steal" interesting threads from other forums? .

I want to know also other staff that can be done without inverting money I am ready to work hard to make this happen and i have time to put on this.
The idea is to get some good traffic going using white hat SEO and keep people in with the forum and new interesting articles than earn from absence and affiliate links to products on the niche, does this approach sound logic?

thanks to anyone who gives advice!

SP

[nicho]

You have to think outside the box a little if you want to create traffic for your forum , products etc especially if you want the forum to grow into something that really helps other people at the same time as making you money.

One method which you will not see advertised or spoken about in any of the threads on the internet is a method that l call critical mass marketing, when you see this puppy loose regardless of the niche you would not be able to stop the traffic if you tried but it will take a little time to set up and see the results but thankfully very little money is needed if any.

First you need to do a little research and gather your keywords and phrases just like you would do if you were planning the niche.

The you need to go and get pdfpup from http://www.pdfpuppro.com/ to make this all work, this is a pdf creator which will also build your a list of people and also re direct to whatever url you ask it to. Just visit the website first read and watch any videos, be warned although you can do a blackhat download of the program it will do you no good as it needs registration plus you will need the ongoing updates.

Now the good part about this is that all of your content is already written in the 1000's of articles you can get from all over the internet article directories.

All you simply do is to produce taster small pdf's in the keywords you need and want to use like anxiety problems etc phobias or whatever is in your keyword list.
You will of course offer this information as a free download at all the freebie giveaways and forums for your keywords that you can find, the pdf when opened will give them a pop up which collects their name and address and re-directs them then to your forum or whatever url you them to go to.

The last part is based upon peoples greed like here in the bhw, everyone wants something for nothing so l would upload them to as many as you can find blackhat sites on the internet and let them do their work.

As your getting all of your content for nothing with articles written by experts you can use this method to your hearts content and you will by pass the search engines and the duplicant content problem.

At the same time you can go over to facebook start a page then start your own free ebook service and watch the followers jump to your site and join your email list and you can use this for just about any category you in facebook and MYSPACE.

This is a viral method that always works 100% of the time and builds as the ebooks get passed around so the invest of a few dollars in pdfpup is nothing.

As l have already said it is a critical mass marketing method that l could sell for quite a bit so take advantage of it and get ahead of the crowd.

The above link is not an affiliate link or a free download link.

[salocharly]

thanks for the share i will think about that......

[manolo12399]

You have to think outside the box a little if you want to create traffic for your forum , products etc especially if you want the forum to grow into something that really helps other people at the same time as making you money.

One method which you will not see advertised or spoken about in any of the threads on the internet is a method that l call critical mass marketing, when you see this puppy loose regardless of the niche you would not be able to stop the traffic if you tried but it will take a little time to set up and see the results but thankfully very little money is needed if any.

First you need to do a little research and gather your keywords and phrases just like you would do if you were planning the niche.

The you need to go and get pdfpup from http://www.pdfpuppro.com/ to make this all work, this is a pdf creator which will also build your a list of people and also re direct to whatever url you ask it to. Just visit the website first read and watch any videos, be warned although you can do a blackhat download of the program it will do you no good as it needs registration plus you will need the ongoing updates.

Now the good part about this is that all of your content is already written in the 1000's of articles you can get from all over the internet article directories.

All you simply do is to produce taster small pdf's in the keywords you need and want to use like anxiety problems etc phobias or whatever is in your keyword list.
You will of course offer this information as a free download at all the freebie giveaways and forums for your keywords that you can find, the pdf when opened will give them a pop up which collects their name and address and re-directs them then to your forum or whatever url you them to go to.

The last part is based upon peoples greed like here in the bhw, everyone wants something for nothing so l would upload them to as many as you can find blackhat sites on the internet and let them do their work.

As your getting all of your content for nothing with articles written by experts you can use this method to your hearts content and you will by pass the search engines and the duplicant content problem.

At the same time you can go over to facebook start a page then start your own free ebook service and watch the followers jump to your site and join your email list and you can use this for just about any category you in facebook and MYSPACE.

This is a viral method that always works 100% of the time and builds as the ebooks get passed around so the invest of a few dollars in pdfpup is nothing.

As l have already said it is a critical mass marketing method that l could sell for quite a bit so take advantage of it and get ahead of the crowd.

The above link is not an affiliate link or a free download link.

Wow so helpfull, some times I ask myself why I dont come out with this ideas.

[salocharly]

lol i know he is promoting.... do you have some advice to offer manolo?

[manolo12399]

Hi, I saved this thread a while ago, may be of some help, and you can find something you can use.

I never build any forum, I know they are hard to promote, the only thinks come to my mind is the use of the data that you can gather from your members.

Like facebook does, but will need time I think.

Anyway, I found the free version of that pdf pop up, is the free version relised from the same guy, I think the site is:

marketit.com

May be if you say build a site on weight loss, gather all the plr you can find here there is one member that shared quite a lot.

Make a pdf with the pdf pop up software that redirect to your software, and share them anywhere you can.

I am thinking to do that, not to promote a forum, will let you know if I manage to get started.

I've been reading this place for a very long time and thought finally it was time for me to post something!

I wanted to post about a new thing thats rising and how you can be a part of it FREE. I've setup approx 10 autoforums by now and they are making me decent money!

First in order to setup your forum with PHPBB you can find the instructions on how to setup a forum with phpbb on youtube.. if you have fantastico like me its just one click and the forum is setup!

Next you need a software called aut*oforumpos*ter ... Like there are autoblogging tools this is the software you need.. you can get it for pretty much free... the link to the software website is

Code:

http://www.autoforumposter.com

You can see the demo of the software starting from 5:20 .... inorder to get he software for pretty much free... follow the steps below

1) make your own clickbank account and generate your hoplink for the product..

2) now go to the product website and click close tab and you would reach the payment page.

3) Select paypal on the payment page and pay the $5 with your paypal account... You would be getting $1.79 back as commisions in your account so effectively you get the software for a measly $3!!!

4) now cancel your subscription on paypal and enjoy the software.. if you dont know how to cancel the paypal suscription find the details here: https://www.paypal.com/helpcenter/ma...&t=solutionTab

5) Setup your software and enjoy...! The software would keep working for like forever as it is working for me now.. they are pretty stupid and dont cancel your license!

6) You can create 15 autoforums with each copy.. so next time you want to make a autoforum just repeat...

I'm posting 5000 new posts on each of my forum every single day.. and i've not allowed guests to read posts and everybody has to register inorder to read so what is happening is i'm getting like 50% sign up rate on the traffic coming in and i'm emailing them 3 times a week making me decent money added to that i've slapped adsense on all the forums..!

Also one more thing in order to rank quickly in the search engines i picked up a domain from goaddy auctions and i got a 10year old aged domain for $15...! And created 20000 backlinks with scrapebox in a matter of a month and its ranking like crazy everywhere.. so m getting alot of traffic...! even if you dont do this the forum would still get traffic...

one more thing.. google is already deindexing a lot of autoblogs on a daily basis but since this is a new concept google is yet to catch on to this! Added to that google cant blame a forum for content not being unique since its the users posting.. also the software has a unique content plugin which makes all content unique before posting .. i dint buy it but you can if you want to!

Hope you enjoyed the post!

[GreyWolf]

...
the first thing I check before signing a up to a forum is the quantity of users and post there is into it if i see is very little i just look for a bigger one, so my question is how do i get started with my forum?? how can i get people to join even if it is a new thing, is a good idea to fake the member numbers and tread quantity and just "steal" interesting threads from other forums? ...

The easiest way to accomplish this part is exactly what you thought of.

Set up your forum and then seed it with some fake accounts. Either write you're own posts or scrape from other forums. Then have you're fake users start new threads using those posts, and have other fake users accounts post replies in those threads. I'd say a reasonable amount to start with would be about 100 users accounts. Half that number would be nonparticipating/lurker accounts, the other half would be your participating members. About 10-20 making the bulk of activity, then the other 30-40 members would be under 5 or 10 posts. Spread the join dates and posting dates out across a month or so. Be sure to write the threads and replies in such a way to really look like they're coming from different people. I just used 100 as a rough number, depending on how much effort you want to put into it you could do a lot less or a lot more. You'll have to be creating or scraping the content to use yourself so just choose a number that you think you can manage. It can be even easier if you can get a few of your friends to set up profiles and they can help make your forum active.

Depending on the topics and how you feel about them you can give some of the fake profiles different viewpoints on the topics and then create a bit of debate in some of the threads. To do it right you need to be sure to keep a fake user consistent in the various threads. In other words a single user shouldn't come across as a "bleeding heart liberal" in one thread and then "right wing fanatic" in another. You would want those two viewpoints to belong to separate users.

The point of seeding the forum like this is to accomplish two different things. First, it can make new visitors see an active forum that they might possible want to be part of. Second, it gives you a chance to set the direction you want the forum to head in.

As you start getting real members, then you just make the fake profiles become less and less active until you're left with nothing but real members participating. Even after you don't need the fake profiles anymore you can still use them occasionally if you want to bring up some subject that you don't really want to associate with your main profile. Just give it some thought and use your imagination and you'll figure out how to make the most use of those profiles.

How much work it will be to do that will just depend on how real and how active you want the forum to seem. Setting up the fake accounts and making seed threads might seem like a lot of work, but you're controlling the content completely at that time. As more and more real people join you'll find a lot more time than that will be spent just keeping up with the content they're posting. You might find it was a lot easier when you were managing the fake members.

Forums can take up a lot of your time, so you need to be prepared for that.

The rest of it is all about promoting you're new forum. Use some of the ideas others have given for that and also look through the other forums on BHW for even more site promotion ideas. Do direct promotion on sites like facebook, yahoo answers, craigslist, other forums, blogs, even myspace would still be good to promote the type of forum your planning.

Good luck to you.

[salocharly]

thanks Manolo and Graywolf for you advice, i am gonna be doing just that.... amazing tips! my site is divided by two parts one is the .info site made in Joomla with general info, and the second is phpBB forum, i am trying to find an application that can make it easy to make lots of users fast, there is any software to scape forum threads and post i could use? i plan to rewrite them anyways but will be much faster if part of that will be automated....by the way, what kind of forum platform is used on "black hat world'? anyone knows? thanks again for the support!

[GreyWolf]

Creating the fake members is just a one time deal and you'll want to give them good usernames and seemingly real info. Since you'd have to provide all the names, etc anyway I don't think you really need to automate it. You could probably just myphpadmin to edit your mysql database and add the new users directly. Doing it that way you could just enter them all at once and set different join dates, but you need to make sure you know all the fields to fill out. (If your not careful you could break the database.) Since it's your own forum though it'll probably be just as easy to do it from within the forum admin instead. A forum is typically a longterm project, so you'd be better off to take the time to set it up right. Just set the forum as private initially and spend about a month making the profiles and posting the seed threads and replies. Do that before you take the forum "live" and you'll probably get better longterm results.

The BHW forum uses vbulletin. It's pretty robust, but isn't free. phpBB is a pretty well supported script too, so it should be good enough for you. The best part about phpBB is that it's free. If you like the functionality of vBulletin you should read through the phpBB forum, you'll find a lot of advice on how to duplicate a lot of the look and feel of vBulletin with phpBB. My advice would be to just go with the phpBB since you don't have a lot of money to invest.

[imdavidcelis]

u can start the forum by designin how will the page look like? i mean i want to create a forum but with the layout i designed

[bigg_capp]

PM your forum address to me. We can trade forum registration and posts. I have done this with other forum admins and it's helped me out greatly.

Also run a simple post contest - Have people register on a CPA gateway content locker and split the money with the winner. If you get 50 sign-ups on incentive CPA offers averaging .80 cents then you can giveaway a $20 Game stop giftcard.

I am running a post count superbowl square contest for January. Now I'm earning enough (barely) on my board to cover the expense. I won't make any money in January but I will probably gain 15 solid members.

I hope that info helps.
-Capp

[marvic]

what forum engine u use?

[salocharly]

i am using phpbb3 why you ask?

[salocharly]

u can start the forum by designin how will the page look like? i mean i want to create a forum but with the layout i designed

what do you mean? i am using a ready style and customizing it on the way changing some of the image files.....

[salocharly]

Creating the fake members is just a one time deal and you'll want to give them good usernames and seemingly real info. Since you'd have to provide all the names, etc anyway I don't think you really need to automate it. You could probably just myphpadmin to edit your mysql database and add the new users directly. Doing it that way you could just enter them all at once and set different join dates, but you need to make sure you know all the fields to fill out. (If your not careful you could break the database.) Since it's your own forum though it'll probably be just as easy to do it from within the forum admin instead. A forum is typically a longterm project, so you'd be better off to take the time to set it up right. Just set the forum as private initially and spend about a month making the profiles and posting the seed threads and replies. Do that before you take the forum "live" and you'll probably get better longterm results.

The BHW forum uses vbulletin. It's pretty robust, but isn't free. phpBB is a pretty well supported script too, so it should be good enough for you. The best part about phpBB is that it's free. If you like the functionality of vBulletin you should read through the phpBB forum, you'll find a lot of advice on how to duplicate a lot of the look and feel of vBulletin with phpBB. My advice would be to just go with the phpBB since you don't have a lot of money to invest.

thanks again for the info!

[blackhattrial]

it is really hard to promote a forum
you get traffic you get members
but members participation is what you wont get.

I am working on another forum now -

for creating fake profiles and posts focus on long tail keyword with no or little competition.

in SMF forum ( BEST FREE SCRIPT)

u get mod which can allow visitors to see posts thread topics and canview each individual thread content
Use this to create topics which actually gets you signups.

thing is how do you do this smart way....

you add content and make people visit your forum form twitter - fb and other sites.


I wld be using FB and others forums to spam PM messages

[rickstar]

Maintaining a forum is pretty time consuming, especially the set up. Although, unlike some other businesses, it's pretty fun. See if you can recruit any mods to help you out in the beginning. Focus on inflating your member counts, and keep your member count up. Be nice, make them feel special and offer up exclusive content and what not. Use an 'auto-reply' mod to automatically reply from a few fake profiles for every member that creates an introduction thread.

Keep things moving in the forum, run contests, new designs etc.

Check this guide.


http://newspier.com/how-to-build-a-online-community/