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Dolbz

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Feb 6, 2008
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Hi,
I i've got a great niche which looks like it could acommodate a fair sized forum as there is no one else doing it right now. I'm ok with the technical side of hosting and forum software but I've never built a userbase from scratch.

What suggestions do you guys how for building a user base? I've considered incentivizing such as revenue sharing with adsense (like dp) and using PPC to get initial traffic.

I've also considered building a content site first to bring in traffic before opening the forums.

Has anyone got experience with this? and what has worked/failed for them?

Cheers
Dolbz
 


I feel bad. I just remembered to search...after I posted. From what I read on another thread this has been answered many many times....*runs off to hide*
 
yea feel bad! :p

you could try registering 20 times and populate the forum with relevant posts you make with each username. This way the forum doesn't seem empty and people will actually join.
 
well no one will join a empty forum - so you have to create discussions, using social media sites to get some traffic that hopefully turns into memberships
 
I started Roleplayerguild.com in June and it's pretty active now. Every once in a while I swap the header out for ringtones offers and such and can get me a quick three-figure amount in one day. Grew really quickly and I let one of my oldest members take over my admin account (Mahzkrieg) and he runs everything for me.

1) Fuck paid posting.
2) On your own or with a few friends, make a few accounts and cultivate your own discussion. aim for high quality threads/posts to "set the standard."
3) Focus on catering to your initial legitimate members. My most influencial/popular/active members are the ones that signed up at the beginning. They've set the standards and became mods. Most of them are still around.

I didn't advertise at all. Instead I launched a big backlink-generation campaign. I searched for my "competition" to simply see where their links were. Then I shimmied my link everywhere they were. My niche is pretty narrow so I found some great relevent websites to stick my link in. My biggest referrer is actually a wiki-software website where links are nofollow. I get like 200 clicks/day from there!

Notice the loyalty of my userbase though. I think I'm averaging 100posts/user.
 
Additionally, I run multiple forums. It's fun for me to manage communities and I'm currently writing an infoproduct on community-building.

What's your niche? Building a forum isn't as big of an undertaking as people think. Most people just install vB and let it sit, paying for forum posts that fucking suck. Most people also make forums on the same tired niches like webmastery, internet biz, etc. Most failures are just copycats that refuse to innovate or think slightly outside of the box enough to conside a new niche. :)
 
Thanks for all the ideas. They've given me some good things to think about. My niche is a little secret for now ;)

In the UK (where I'm based) I think it could grow very well once it's established. Not sure on the popularity in other markets but I've got some good afilliate schemes that are UK based.

I would share the niche but there really isn't much competition in it at the moment and I need a little while to hit the ground running and get a head start.
 
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