Forum numbers

[Doc Magnus]

Hi fellas and ladies

I wonder if any of you can help me?

Ok, I have a site (see my signature) and its only a month old, it does great traffic (crazy ammount as it goes) and I'm actually making some sales.

I setup up a forum and its has 70 odd members, but all the users are my mates, work collegues etc, to get the forum active - my problem is getting 'new' users to the forums to make them self sustaining. I am running a caption competition to win free memory sticks and I can see from my stats that folk are visiting but it ain't happening, I'm tring my SEO stuff to get up the Search engines and am making some ground

Has anyone else started of forums and if you have, how did you 'get them going'?

Thanks

[Dan Schulz]

Have your friends tell everyone they know about the forum, and have them tell these people that if they like it, they should in turn tell everyone they know. Now, keep in mind I don't mean spamming email addresses - I mean traditional word of mouth. As in face to face contact.

[Kat]

Participate on other boards and add your sig (like you have here), but I would add a description or tag line, so people seeing your sig INSTANTLY know what your link is to.

70 in a month is good, btw!

[linkin99]

In addition to participating in more boards, advertise on a few bigger ones as your forum may cater to a particular niche. Holding a contest or two may also get more active participants coming by and staying.

[OrangeNick]

Since its only a month old, you have some time. Most of your pages probably aren't indexed yet. It takes time to build a successful site. But 70 for your first month is pretty good. Just keep it up

[Doc Magnus]

Thanks for your advice guys,

I must admit I'm finding it pretty frustrating


Merry Christmas

[lodist]

I emphasis with you mate. My forum on the sansa takes so long to get indexed in google, and even when it does get indexed, my arch nemisis is always on top of me!!
So frustrating!
I would be interesting in swapping links with you, maybe in the admin sigs (I have over 800 posts) just for a little linking?