How To Flow

I noticed so many people on webmaster forums asking how they can get more members to their forum. I will be the first to tell you that its one of the hardest things I have ever done. You might as well just bookmark this article now because your gonna want to come back and refer to it.

First your gonna have to ask yourself what a forum is. If you were to ask me this is what I would tell you.

What is a forum?

Here are my answers.

1.Its an information database - This means that if your forum is about artwork then chances are theres going to be tons and tons of information and peoples experiences related to artwork. People will use the search function on your forum to search through thousands of posts/threads to get what they are looking for. People will also find your forum when they look up specific information with Google and other search engines.

2.Its a community - No this doesent mean that everyone at a forum is a loser looking for friends. It simply means that you are giving people a place where they can discuss whatever your forums about with likeminded people. After a while your forum will get its own feel to it. I have noticed most communities start giving nicknames to their members as a whole, for example at sherdog.net members are reffered to as sherdoggers or at digitalpoint.com they are usually called DP’ers. This is what you want, you want a sense of community and kinship. People who feel this way will be quick to invite friends.

Remember human beings are social creatures, like Joe Rogan said in prison they punish inmates by taking them away from all the killers, rapists and thieves and put them in solitary confinement. People need other people to be happy, thats a scientific fact. You might actually save lives by giving people a place where they can interact and be creative.

Now that we know what a forum is how can we use this information to get more members? Well both of these things I listed represent value. A forum is an information database right? WELL THEN GET SOME INFORMATION UP THERE!

1.Is your forum about fish? Then post some great fish articles! Write your own or if your gonna use other peoples make sure the first thing you post is the source of the article as in the url, don’t ever take from people with out giving them a link, a link is gold to webmasters and is the only reason why they would allow you to post their content on your forum.

WHEN YOU MAKE GOOD THREADS THIS WILL NOT ONLY GIVE PEOPLE SOMETHING TO READ BUT WILL GIVE SEARCH ENGINE SPIDERS CONTENT TO SLURP UP AND DISPLAY IN THEIR SEARCH RESULTS.

Try making a Frequently Asked Questions(F.A.Q.) about your topic and stickying or pinning the thread. This can be an awesome resource your can provide first time visitors right off the bat.

Post every youtube video related to your topic you can find, make your own youtube videos then put a link to your forum in the vid and in the video description. Once you get some members you can have contests where members will make videos, make sure part of the rules are they have to include your url in the videos. Youtube can be a great marketing tool for any website, don’t forget that.

Whenever you write up a nice post/article/FAQ or if you make a vid or whatever else you do to add content you can use social bookmarking like Digg.com or stumbleupon.com to share it with the world. Don’t do this with other peoples content obviously only your own. You can Digg or Stumble good quality threads just like a blog post, just make sure theres lots of good content in whatever your sharing. Make sure you don’t overdo it or you will get banned from Digg like what happened to me. I Dug too many crappy short threads with short first posts.

Remember, no content=no visitors

You can even set up an rss feed to make posts in a certain part of the forum everytime it updates. You may even want to use a bunch of rss feeds to not only post in a certain forum but to show up on your main portal page using products like vbadvanced(for vbulletin). This can make your mainpage into a news resource.
The great thing about having a blog or any other non forum site is that the traffic you already have will filter into your forum and become members. Instead of using a portal script like vbulletin you might even want to use a blog as your mainpage. For example if I was to add a forum to this site I would have the url be

howtoflow.com/forum

Ok we established the importance of content, now remember every forum member you get is someone who will possibly add lots and lots of content to your forum, a great reason to be nice to everyone who visits. Actually another thing you should remember is never under any circumstances be an asshole to anyone, you will just drive people away with all the negativety. I had to learn this the hard way and I still have trouble keeping my mouth shut alot of the time. Just remember that theres never any pride on the line over the internet, don’t let anyone piss your off or have any sort of control over your emotions.

This sorta leads into my next major recommendation to anyone starting a brand new forum or anyone who’s having trouble getting members.

2. Be a bunch of people!

People want to join a forum with activity, noone wants to join a dead community and if they do join they most likely will not come back.

The thing is though if you sign up yourself under alot of different names and post this content under different names it will make your forum look 100% more active for ever username you sign up as. I know this sounds stupid but ask yourself what will look better. A forum with just one member or a forum with 5 members who post new content regularly? Create some unique characters or “gimmicks” as forumers refer to them as and try to make them as funny/entertaining as possible. If your gonna fight with someone online fight with yourself lol. This is your chance to be creative and show off some writing skills.

3.Get posters by any means necessary.

This means beg people to sign up, beg them to stay. Get a reputation at another forum and put a link in your sig(do not do this if the forum owner isnt ok with it, its unethical, usually they don’t care though). Get your friends from real life to come and make some posts. Offer free downloads to anyone who signs up. Your gonna have to give people a reason to come back, sometimes all you need is an active community to get people to come back but when you are first starting you might want to think of ways you can provide people with something they WANT like unique content or downloads or even just entertainment. Put together some contests, send emails to non active members telling them to comeback, do what you gotta do and use your head. If it applies to your nich you might even want to setup a personals section where people can find mates who are into the same stuff they are.

You may want to make a Myspace or Face book page specifically for your forum. You can search for people who you might think will be interested in your topic and invite them as friends. Be carefull with that though you don’t want Tom to think your spamming people, I heard hes a badass.

4.Search Engine Optimization(SEO).

Yes I know this is a scary and confusing word for alot of people but without it you might as well forget everything I already told you and give up on starting your own forum altogether(never give up). First you need to learn the basics of SEO such as

Title Tage

Meta Tags

Keywords in your domain

Backlinks

Trust

Domain Age

Anyways you get the idea, I’m gonna cover more forum specific SEO stuff so please learn about this stuff first using google. Search for stuff like “Basic website SEO”, “Search Engine Optimization Techniques”,”How To Rank High With Search Engines”

Use the links I post at the bottom of this article, The forums I will be mentioning are places where I have learned more about SEO(search engine optimization) than anywhere else.

Anyways for those “experts” out there I will move onto the more forum specific stuff.

-Make your pages as unique as possible, Remember every thread is also a page that search engines see. Get rid of useless junk in your forum titles such as “powered by vbulletin” anything else besides the thread title will just make those threads less “relevent” to search engines. What this means is if someone searches for “how to make cheese” then they will be more likely to see your page high up on the search engine results page if your thread is titled

“how to make cheese” than if its “how to make cheese - powered by vbulletin”

Remember though to keep the copyright information in your footer, you cannot remove that stuff.

-Make sure you have a mainpage that updates with new content regularly, I did touch on this earlier. You can use Vbadvaned and other portal software to display the newest forum threads on your front page. Search engines will like this because to them a main page that constantly is updated means a site that is more likey to be of higher quality, this will gain you “trust” with search engines, Google specifically is real big on trust. Remember a blog can also be a great main/portal page, be sure to make new blog posts regularly. Your main page will also be your highest PR page so more content equals more possible combinations of keywords that will cause your main page to pop up on search engines. Make sure if you have threads feeding to the mainpage that they are from an active subforum that contains threads/posts related to your nich.

- Internal Linking.

If you can, make sure all of your pages not only link back to your homepage but also link to ever forum area. Look at the popular forum

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/

See at the top left of the navbar theres and extra forum jump menu. By having this they make sure every page/thread is gonna link to all the individual subforums. The stock forum jump menu at the bottom right hand side does not actually show the urls if you were to look at the source code. I am not sure about the specifics of this but I do know Digitalpoint is the biggest forum I have ever seen.

By doing this we make sure that “link juice” passes to each of these main forums from every page. To understand this your going to have to learn about how links and link juice effect your search engine rankings.

Make sure any links that point to your main page are uniform meaning that you dont want half of them saying www.forums.com and the other half saying forums.com without the www. This will split up your link juice. Actually you should be only using one or the other anyway. Get non www. to point to www or vice versa use DNS or a htacess redirect.

I’m not gonna go too much more into SEO since theres more than I could possibly cover with this one article so from here on out your gonna have to spend your time not only learning about it but keeping on top of it and other marketing techniques. Here are my favorite places to learn about SEO/marketing for forums and in general.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ - Huge webmaster/SEO community that with a forum specific area here

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=64

http://www.v7n.com/forums/ - A smaller community than Digitalpoint but imo you get more quality information and less new people asking the same questions over and over. The owner John is a really nice guy who is always quick to offer advice.

http://www.bzimage.org/ - A great new forum related to SEO and marketing. Even though its still a new community you will still find tons of great info to help you market and SEO your forum.

http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/forum/ - This is specifically for Vbulletin users but alot of the tricks and tips can be applied to other forum scripts too. This is hands down the best place to learn SEO for forums imo. Check out the Vbulletin SEO section here

http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=17

^^^remember to look at the things these sites do with their forums in fact study every forum you come across and be sure to ask yourself key questions such as “how did this forum get users?” or “why would anyone keep coming back here?”

conclusion:

Now are these tips going to gaurantee success with your forum? Of course not, only a ton of determination, alot of smarts and a little luck will gaurantee success. Be nice to people, generate good karma and remember to always be thinking of new ways to get that new member.

At some point probably after your first 2 or 3 thousand members you should reach a “critical mass” point and the community itself will start attracting new members. Once you are there you should at least be satisfied that you started a community but if you want to make sure people don’t move onto greener pasture and if you really want to start earning some $$$ your gonna have to keep working hard forever. Just remember to take a World of Warcraft or Call of Duty 4 break every so many hours to refresh yourself

Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 8:46 am.
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