Attracting New Members to a forum?

[blacknight]

I acquired Free Technical Support - Technical Chat - Mobile Devices - Gadgets a couple of months ago and I haven't really had much success in attracting new members.

Admittedly I've been really busy with my "real" job, but I would welcome any suggestions on how I could get more people on there actively posting.

[babyboy808]

I have seen numerous forums holding Contests. You could offer prizes for top posters, best thread etc etc... You could create some T Shirts with the techsupportboards.com logo and give those away?

[blacknight]

The problem is that I don't have a budget for any of those things

[Zascar]

I posted a similar thread a few months ago. At that stage it was only my message board that was up but now the main site is now live too and since then my traffic has increased a lot, however I still have only a few members, but signups are steady and growing. I find that the content on the main site provides quite a lot of traffic from search engines - about 50% of my traffic comes from Google. Perhaps you could get a collection of tips and tricks etc that would attract visitors? Create a site similar to www.TweakXP.com and allow visitors to submit their own tips.

My initial thought were that there must be hundreds of forums out there that are dedicated to tech support - so as a visitor I'm probably more likely to go find one that has many members already, as I have a better chance of getting my question answered there than on a board that is only brand new. However saying that some people like new message boards as tghey can quickly establish themselves as a regular and smaller communities are often a lot nicer and more personal.

What do you envisage for your forum. What direction do you want it to go it? Whu did you get it up in the frst place? Advertising revenue or personal reasons? Try to find something unique to attract members.

Just my 2 cent!
Hope that helps

[blacknight]

Zascar

I might not be able to answer the questions, but they've given me some food for thought.

On the content side of things I know what you mean - the site is already getting quite a bit of organic traffic based on the existing threads. As it's a forum I don't want to go shoving extra stuff on there just to boost the amount of content, but maybe I could try to get more threads going to provide more content.

I picked up the site as it appealed to me.

Michele

[Zascar]

Perhaps have a section on useful tips, and create posts on solving some of the most asked questions?

If you can find out what the most popular problems are that people search for, and create a post with a quick and easy answer, it might help.

I've started putting together pages on tutorials, video's, current news etc. Anything to get people browsing - decent content will always win over anything else.

Hope this helps

[blacknight]

Hmm. That sounds like a good idea

[louie]

Yes it does, and taking in consideration you have staff that a very good in this matter, you can ask them to post problems -> solutions.

[blacknight]

Originally Posted by louie

Yes it does, and taking in consideration you have staff that a very good in this matter, you can ask them to post problems -> solutions.

They don't have time for that kind of thing. They're too busy actually working

[louie]

That's true, but you could pick-up the problem / solution and write about it.