How to market an online forum?

[PlanCheck]

Hi there,
I have an online forum and I want to market it around. how do i do it?

It is site specific to my industry and state at the moment.

I was thinking of just emailing a little postcard flyer to a list of my target market.. what do you think?

Thanks

[Dave Bockett]

While I haven't any direct experience with trying to get forums going I have been thinking about it for a while and do plan to try and launch them on one of my websites in the future.

Definitely email as many people as you can so try and get the interest going.

As far as I can tell the key is to have as large a readership of your website/blog/newsletter as possible. Why has the flyingsolo forums been so successful? They have over 14,000 subscribers and you need a huge number of people as 99% will lurk and never post and it is a vicous circle as no one will post when there are no postings in the forum! You will need to do as much as you can to try and get a few people to help you really kick start the forums.

The other think is to determine what the need is in your industry. What is it people talk about? What are the big issues at the moment? You could feature a key posting in your email communication to try and get people engaged. No harm in being a bit controversial if you want - that always gets people going!

While I haven't really answered you question I hope this is useful?
Dave.

[Renee Barber]

I think a far more straightforward way is to bribe the FS moderators with wine, chocolate or a combination thereof and have them reveal more of their crafty secrets.

[mohn]

Businesses are depend on different advertising, that are economical and fresh. There are some effective ways of business advertise Email Marketing, Email Signatures, eBay, Classified Online Ads, Article Marketing, Online Directories, Social Bookmarking, Forums(flyingsolo.com.au), MySpace/Facebook.

[Jexley]

I've only started two before, one relatively unsuccessful and the other gaining in popularity by the day.

Combine that with the experiences I've gotten from being on here since Day Dot, and I can tell you the one thing that seems rather simple, but is no less important.

Good People.

Get good people, even a few of 'em, using your forum and the rest will come along eventually. Be prepared that it may take a while, but it'll pay off.

Good luck with that.

[AussieWorker]

I have recently started a forum up and it has gone a bit quiet of late but I am assured by others that it requires patience. So in the meanwhile without annoying all my friends I have made a Facebook page and group, invited all my friends and asked them to consider inviting theirs etc and it is starting to stir interests... call it viral marketing but it is working slowly.

I also tried joining like groups in Facebook and making posts, but got a bit carried away and was cautioned by Facebook for "spamming" I was trying not to but I can see how it might have be seen that way... so yeah I have been careful not to push my luck.

Other than that I saw a huge spike of interest by publishing an e-zine article with a link to my sites. I think it is just a matter of keeping positive and being patient. That said I am still looking at ways to get it out there... short of paying for advertising at this stage.

Good luck, let us know how you go.

[VacuumRobot.com.au]

Hi, online forums come and go.. the turn over rate is high. Visit theadminzone(dot)com it's a forum for forum admins. A while ago I started a chat forum, but it wasn't working properly, as it was really like a social networking site, but most people use facebook anyway. Although I did get hundreds of members signing up within a few months, they were not returning members.

You could try to steal members from other forums.. often people are not happy with the current forum, and are looking for alternatives.. be that special alternative and "steal" members from the boring forums.. hope this helps.

Or just study and do some SEO, with targeted keywords for your niche. Best of luck!

Dave