How to kick start a forum?

I would say that it might be a good idea to have your forum piggyback upon a related site so if you are doing a forum for Porsche 911 owners, create a main site first and funnel people into the forum, which you first seed with topics and comments from friends and family.
 
Read the historical definition of the word "troll", as in a monster that lives under a bridge. Don't let a small minority of people dominate the whole forum, and possibly run better potential members off. Low-class people have a tendency to find each other, form strong cliques, dumb the discourse down to their level and anyone that isn't immediately comfortable rubbing elbows with a pack of low-end degenerate drunks, drug-addicts and ne'er-do-wells will quickly migrate somewhere else. I watched a bar owner inform a group of "regulars" that he didn't want them to come around any more. They'd camp at one end of the bar, every night, night after night, pressure anyone that was in "their" spot to move somewhere else, didn't spend much money, dominated the whole room, and the bartender's time, were loud, stupid, obnoxious and acted like they owned the place. Until the owner threw them out for ever. Told them to go up the street, to another place, that didn't care about it's image, or the quality of it's customers.

Most forum owners assume that as long as people aren't using bad language, and aren't "offending" anyone, then everything is good. Not true. You can have a well-populated forum filled with idiots, who have nothing to offer a newcomer that is not an idiot. I see there are a lot of well-behaved members here, that don't use bad language, and don't offend anyone.
 
Last edited:
I agree.
There is nothing worst than going into a forum as a newbie
and having people talk down at you for just simply asking a question...

Sure, its annoying to repeatedly answer the same questions from newcomers instead of them searching... but also you're losing potential conversions.
 
I have started a new niche forum. I am having trouble getting it populated. While the forum is new, the domain is old and ranked so it is getting traffic but the traffic doesn't seem to be converting (meaning registering on the forum as members). I believe that that it could be due to the fact that the forum is currently empty. So when a new visitors reaches the forum and sees an empty forum, they don't feel the temptation to register (I think that's the reason why traffic is not converting into members). Maybe once the forum is a little bit populated, new visitors will want to register and join the conversations.

So besides hiring paid posters, what are the other ways of kick starting a forum? How do I make the visitors want to join the forum? The traffic that I am getting is targeted as they are coming from search traffic but still not converting into members.

Go on Flippa and buy a forum with some posts already and then just revamp it. Get some content and discussions going, lots of them, that's the first step before you can do anything.
 
Can you please mention which type of forum it is?
Niche?
Then I suggest you to go with good promotion of your forum with the populated area websites.
 
Back
Top