Promoting your New Mesage Board / Website

[Zascar]

Hey Guys,

I've just started a new website - I've always wanted to build my own site and attract a use base with a common interest and watch it grow into a usefully resource with an active community etc - so I’ve just started creating the site and hope it

The site is : www.DigitalDjForum.com - and it is aimed at Digital DJ's - i.e. DJ’s who do not solely use Turntables and Vinyl but instead use computers and mp3's to mix and produce music. It is an industry very much in its infancy but growing very quickly, and its something I’ve been interested in for years.

So, I’ve started building the site, so far I have only really got the forum completed so far. I am currently working on a main site which will have news, reviews, downloads, links and any other worthwhile resource I can find. I’m using Joomla CMS so should have the start of the site up in about a week or so all going well.

In the mean time I would like to get some activity on the forum. People are not interested in a forum with no posts, but everyone has to start somewhere, so I was hoping some of the more experienced members here could advise on how to start off and attract visitors, and attract them back!

Thanks.

[blacknight]

I'd recommend against using the splash page - I almost clicked away

[Zascar]

Thats only there temporarily - Just a redirect to the forum until I get the main site up.... will be normal in a week or so.

[davidbehan]

Migrate them from a similar forum, e.g. a lot of boards.ie - webmaster forum users are members here. It wasn't that the users were robbed from boards, but I came across links to discussions here from boards. Nothing unethical about it.

Don't go advertising your site on another forum but use that forum and create a sig with a link in it. It'll take time to build up but slowly but surely you'll get your visitors. Just be ethical about how you get your users!

[Cormac]

I'm not fond of the domain name. It's hard to read when it's all in lowercase - digitaldjforum -

Is the site just going to be a forum or is going to be a main area? If that is the case then a domain such as digitaldj.com with the forum accessible by .com/forum would be better. But that domain is already taken...

dig.it.al-dj.com is a nice little domain hack

As for the promotion aspect...there is a SEO thread on VBulletin on here in the SEO forum. Posting on other related message boards will help. A competition would raise interest too...

[Zascar]

The domain name is easily changed. Or I can change the /forum to /chat etc

I'll look into the SEO aspect as soon as I've got most of the main site done
cheers

[Gavin]

You could always go down the Myspace route. Most people will agree that Myspace profiles are the crappiest designed pages on the web but if you know CSS then it’s easy to have a very attractive profile.

Use the music on your profile to your advantage. If you have a very catchy tune it is more than likely your visitors will stay on the page to hear it finish and probably read the rest of your profile. Perfect chance to throw some links in front of them, but using a way that’s not obvious to what you are actually doing.

You can also use images and YouTube videos to make your profile more attractive but with the images, store them on your own hosting account and link back to the forum.

Spend a few hours browsing through profiles of people who you would think would be interested in your own forum and request to be a friend. Most people, especially music artists, will be more than happy to add you as its more coverage for them. At some point they’ll start finding your profile and requesting to be added.

The music forums and groups have thousands of people using them, a gold mine if you know how to attract them. Advertising your site outright can somewhat lead to failure, especially of someone reports you as spam (even if its not).

Post comments on the profiles of your contacts and use images, again link to your own site but don’t forget to interact with some of your friends. Once you start getting a higher contact list send a bulletin to everyone about once a month. You could always send a poll question and drop the url of the poll that’s on your site.

For one thing, building up a profile on Myspace doesn’t happen over night but it does have thousands of potential visitors to your forum.

If you need posts on your forum quickly you can pay people to post. Personally, I don’t like the idea of paid posting and usually see it as low quality posts but maybe because I know that it’s paid posting. Or you could setup a few accounts and start having conversations with yourself, to at least get some activity on the board.

Unfortunately I don’t have a forum so I don’t have the experience in promoting one but looking at your niche the above is what I would target.

[lato]

Hi Jascar,
It is not easy without a network of people and would test the strongest resolve, but never impossible.

I would agree with Rollo re www.DigitalDjForum.com/forum or the like.
You could start gathering content, either research or personal knowledge, or combinations, which you'd have to do anyway to a certain degree.

Any potential subscribers won't stay if there is nothing of value/distraction, there.

Gather and assemble free dj related software, wallpaper (create if you can), graphics (make if you can), and consider an offline competition or session of some sort and at some point?

Re-post/mention any offerings that you have, on your home page pointing to optimised pages on such offerings. And likewise for anything on the forum itself, which may or may not evolve into sef urls.

Assuming that a market in Ireland may be smallish, at the moment , you can/should consider all foreign english speaking ones, so seek out similar sites and forums everywhere. As you go, assemble lists (urls and such) which might fit later, if you decide to put a directory type/style thing together, either soon or in the future.

Prepare to work. I'm sure some of us will drop links around the planet once there is something to describe, if you know what I mean.

Modern networks are great and the people who experiment in music (whether they sustain it or not, which is largely irrelevant) seem to be students. Get/enlist buddies to use college noticeboards if they apply.

Find/bride with free software, a bebo merchant/veteran who might slip it in.

Find tools if possible, and tool makers if affordable. There are great tools around but you'll notice that the makers wont/dont optimise for them; perhaps you could and link out to such tools?

Find/list open source tools and software. It is a complete assumption that our modern bebo goers are familar with trawling the internet. Use this.

Get in the blogging networks or create a blog , and ensure that anything of value is linked and with proper/descriptive titles if thats the way you go.
Likewise for Squiddoo and swicki.eurekster.com (no follow but some traffic and search). You can write pages on swicki but don't go to too much trouble, where it should be on your own domain first. Or do both, and differently.

And whatever you do, don't start dropping business cards at music events because that would be wrong?
Join Orkut and ask Larry Mullen for tips, or a million bucks, but give him a choice.




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