If you want to have a forum on your site, how can you make it so active?

Question

I mean how you can make lots of users use it?

Answer 1

First, try adding useful niche content to your website. It could be articles, or software plug-ins, whatever you have to offer that's relevant to the website's niche.

Once you have a large enough pool of regular daily visitors, then you can launch your forum. You'll want to make it an event with your regular visitors so that people will begin to post immediately. Hype it up for a couple of weeks.

Whatever you do, don't add the forum until you have a good number of regular visitors. There's nothing more depressing than a dead forum. (If you've already added the forum, take it down. Work on building up content and establishing an audience first.)

Answer 2

To make lots of users use it, you need to first attract

those users BUT don't try to bring people to your

forum until you have made a few posts yourself.

When making those posts however, make sure

they are open ended, general type posts that

can draw people into a discussion. For instance,

if your forum is about football.. you should make

posts like "Who do you think will win....so and so"

Also, if you have the money, you can think of using

a pay-per-post system where you pay people for

making useful posts on your forum at the start or

you make a contest. e.g the first person to make

10 posts win this.

When all these are in place, then and only then

should you start drawing people to your forum so

that when they come, they meet something..

making them more inclined to coming back.

To attract these people, try to write short articles

on something related to your forum and post on

article submission sites like www.ezinearticles.com,

www.isnare.com etc and you can also upload it

to www.scribd.com BUT remember to include

a link back to your forum.

Do all these consistently everyday for the first

30days and your forum will definitely grow.

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http://profitbomb.com

Answer 3

The only way to get users to use it --- is if you have quite a bit of user visiting your site in the first place and if it's a community-based site.  Forums are usually for recurring visitors who have something to talk about with one another.  It depends what kind of site yours is.  Sometimes forums simply take away from a site.  A person visiting a site with an empty forum will see the forum is empty and your site will lose its credibility.  Until you have a significant amount of traffic, I would shy away from putting a forum on your site.