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Do you want your forum to be an active one? Read this.
Do you want your forum to be an active one? Read this.
The first step for making your forum active is to persuade people place posts regularly, but this first step is probably the hardest thing to do. Even if you have posts on your forum, not so many readers will place posts regularly and most will never post at all. Now you need a topic starter and after that the replies will keep coming. In order to get the forum to a point where it is self-sustaining, you will have to do a lot of work.
To get the things started you need to place a starter topic. Register yourself as several members (you with multiple identities) and talk to yourself. (Note that this will not work in forum with logged IP). This will create enough "seed" posts to get people to read and perhaps add replies of their own.
To keep the users interested you will need to find some good material for your discussion. If you don’t have an interesting subject, go search the web. You can find them really easy: go to other forums, newspapers etc. After you have some ideas you can go on and have a nice little dialogue with your multiple personalities.
Now after you placed some posts you need to make some publicity. Advertise your forum as best as you can. Here are some suggestions: place visible links on your website, you can add the link of the forum to the signature of your email, speak about your forum wherever you can (friends, other forums etc).
You can also use your forums to notify the readers about the changes made to your website. This is a great way to make announcement because people can write their thoughts about the new feature (or article) you've just added.
In the war of forum activities you have to find allies. Many more webmasters share your pain of having a low traffic forum. So you can escape this dilemma by emailing those webmasters and offer to join their forums and post a few messages, then ask them if they can return you the same favor. Even if they don't have a forum, offer to write about their web site or add a link to their site in exchange for some posts.
Once you have some posters and your member population grows, find a few good posters (the ones that post high-quality messages and replies) and ask them if they want to help you moderate the forum. Give them more rights than other users so that they can edit and/or delete other people posts. They will help you keep the forum in order; make sure all the rules are followed and help you answers questions. Many people are happy to take on this challenge.
If some members are registered and have not returned you can send emails to them to let them know what has changed and convince them to visit your site again. But do not abuse. Be sure to respect their rights by including appropriate unsubscribe information and take their name off the mailing list at their request.
Some other things to keep in mind is that you should start your forums small with perhaps 3-4 categories, then slowly expand and create more categories. This way, the forums does not look so empty. Additionally, some forums software has polling features. Use these to your advantage. Controversial polls and topics can create flurries of activity.
The last step you can resort is hiring a professional. These are people who know their job well and can do some nice tricks if you let them. If you are stuck and don’t know what to do this is really the best thing for you. This would be my last option, but it may work for you.
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