Thanks for all the submissions for questions that you want to have answered. Here are the questions:

How do I see a demographic location of search engines queries?

Thank you for such a good question. The tool that you are wanting is done by google and can be viewed at http://www.google.com/trends.

For the example you provided (wanting to view the popularity of the keyword “lawyers” in a specific city) I typed this without the quotes:
“los angeles, lawyers”

Hope that helps for question number 1.

Does paid posting help forums grow?

This is a good question that I’ve heard a lot, and even asked myself recently. I came to this conclusion about paid posting. Paid posting only works if you are bringing a seperate source of traffic besides the ‘paid posters’. So this means that you must spread the word of your forum in every way possible while you are paying people to make the forum “look like it’s active”. See the key thing you have to realize is that your forum is not truly active when it’s being paid for, it’s an illusion to hook other’s into thinking “oh, this is a active community. It’s worth my time to join!”. There is one other benefit that paid posting brings, it gives you content. Usually good, sometimes useless. Either way that can help bring you in some search engines, but I doubt any threads of theirs will get ranked unless it turned into some huge thread linked by every blogger around (doubtful).

So basically, if you want a “hook” for visitors to catch while you market in several ways other than paid posting, THEN paid posting has the potential to be somewhat effective.

Do paid referral and posting contests help a forum grow?

Meh. It really depends on the niche of your forum. It also depends if you can afford it. Users really have to find the item or money to be a worthwhile goal (something worth it) in order to refer others or bring in the posting numbers. I would honestly say the return ratio isn’t worth it. You’re paying for people to spam. Spam is never quality content and will never get “true visitors” of your niche to be interested. If people are only active due to the incentive of a prize, then obviously they aren’t going to contribute to the fullest potential on the topic of the forum. They have different interests for being a member when you create these incentives.

So as a summary on paid contests and referrals, it’s not worth the money. I rather pay for “real paid posters” that actually bring in relevant content (depending on the quality of the service. Just check out the top paid posting firms, like forumelves.)

Should I market my community in MySpace? Should I also try guerilla techniques to try to lure them in (posting a crazy profile picture?)

No, no, and no.

Sorry, MySpace has a smaller return ratio than asking out a sober celebrity to go down on you.

The ratios that I have seen, experienced, and heard from others is that of maybe 7% of your friend base actually signs up on your site. Less even post, that’s not worth it to me.

Guerilla techniques in the way you describe or probably any other way won’t work, that’s pure luck or a spark of genius stupidity.

To truly promote a new forum, there is no shortcut, it’s a lot of time and work. Start optimizing the content and layout, then bring in the traffic by creating a ton of relationships and backlinks and maybe a “hook” if you can afford it.

Got Fisch?

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Back to Top.