You may be asking yourself this question when you started your forum. Things that may go on in your mind is “How do I get more members?” - “Wait, how do I even get them to be active” (Hold on that thought buddy, that’s harder than the first one).

What you need to do, is make sure your forum, or community - whatever has a target audience. What does that mean? A niche. If you do not have a niche, you’ll fail sorry. No, a general topic forum will not succeed. There’s no chance, just give up on that thought. You have to be more creative than that to have a successful community these days. If you have chosen a community that is centered around the idea of a certain topic, THEN you might be successful. You still have to ask yourself if you have countless hours to spend on plugging your community and getting QUALITY link backs.

The first thing I suggest you to do after you get a niche, is to make sure your forum looks good for your target audience. If your community looks like shit, you will have the hardest time in the world getting an active community. It would take years upon years to actually have any mass to activity. Think of it as a first impression, if someone doesn’t like the colors, or it’s just “meh” they’ll close the site and never come back. I have written a nice article on how to give a a community a professional look and feel (That is what you want to aim for, be professional. By being professional you can reach out to your audience and make them trust the site).

The next thing you should do is start generating content for your forums. Yes, create fake usernames, create posts, create threads. Talk to yourself! Beg your friends to help you out. Having as much content on the site as possible is VERY important to create a “active” community effect and this will make your visitors want to join. It’s purely psychological to a visitors eyes. And actually, in a search engines eyes it could get you ranked in it’s search results, so take that into account aswell. The higher the quality of the threads, the more likely you are to get indexed in websites. But that requires that you have some backlinks to your community aswell. I will get into that later. But for now on this step, CREATE CONTENT!

Once you have done that, you need to have an audience to market to. A very quick way to have hundreds and thousands of people susceptable to joining your site by interest driven traffic is Zoints. You can use their social profile system (dedicated to forum communities) to help connect your site to every other community that joins Zoints. This is very powerful because it is interest driven traffic. This is the most powerful traffic you can recieve to your community. Why is this? Because it has the highest return ratio to members signing up vs. a lurker visiting. Why? Because their “interests” brought them to your community! Very powerful. Oh and did I mention Zoints is free? Yeah, go check it out. (Be sure to install their tagging system to take advantage of another system for interest driven traffic, VBulletin only sorry.).

Now you are going to need to do some Search Engine Optimization. What SEO will do is it will allow search engines to rank your threads and posts into higher areas in the appropriate search engine. This is great because if someone searches a topic in a search engine, it is likely that your communities thread can show up if it’s SEO’d properly. Oh you may be asking yourself “shit, how do I SEO properly?” No need to fear, you don’t have to pay me a million dollars to tell you. I will tell you in very simple ways on how to get a high SEO rating, it takes time though, and there are no secrets. Just a lot of hard work. Here they are:

1) Generate backlinks. (What the hell are those?) for e.g: Check out this writing community! Notice how I created the backlink, the way I did it is very important. It’s not good to just have backlinks to your site like this: http://www.writersbeat.com, bad, no! It doesn’t have any anchor text. Anchor text “writing community” is what will get your site ranked in search engines a lot easier and better, especially for the keywords used in the anchor text. Oh, must I say that backlinks must be from relevant content websites? Otherwise it’ll be pointless and could even hurt your community.

2) Submit your website to relevant directories. This will help out your community a lot. I am sure there is a directory that has a place for your community. Just take your time to research and submit yourself there. Be sure you choose a nice description to lure those visitors in.

3) Download SEO software for your community (ZSEO or VBSEO). You’ll find these in the vbulletin modification forums if you have vbulletin. For other forum software I am not sure, you’ll have to ask another person on that. ZSEO is free, and is what I use. VBSEO is for a price, but highly respected. I’d say you’re fine with ZSEO :).

4) Good, nice, attractive content in your community. If it’s nonsense, most likely search engines won’t rank you that high. But if you have some threads that are unique on topic and really help a visitor out, be prepared to see some nice returns.

5) Make a company blog and post updates there, also linkback to your forum. Best to create it on a subdomain. It can help with backlinks aswell as a subdomain is a separate entity from your main one.

6) Don’t stop finding backlinks, I stress this is the most important one. Search constantly for relevant sites to help your site grow. Just do it, it may be boring, but it will help you out so much you have no idea.

Summary, get a niche, market it with SEO. No niche, no SEO = you fail.

Hope this helps, thanks for reading.

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