7 ways to Increase Traffic to your Forum

Abraham

Moderator
Staff member
The real indicator of a forum’s success is the consistent growth of its membership and activity levels. Many forums reach a certain growth and get stuck there. Forum owners often are clueless on how to get more users to their forum and this leads to a downward slide for the forum. New users need to become part of the forum each month to keep fresh ideas, questions and answers flowing. Otherwise, the existing community members will become bored soon and the activity in the forum will drop considerably. Here are few effective ways in which a forum owner can ensure that new users keep coming to the forum on a regular basis.




1> Email List

As soon as you start a forum, you must also start two email lists. One for your existing users and one for potential users. You can run contests for your existing forum members, where they refer friends to the forum. You need to send out emails 2 times a month or even 4 times a month to keep your existing users updated and constantly target new users with interesting content.


2> Offer Value for Free

People on the internet love free stuff. This is a great way to reach new users. Create an eBook or a guide around topics in your domain and give it away for free. You can use low competition keywords in the material so that it will also rank highly on search engines. If it is great content, it will get passed around and the word about your forum will reach more people.


3> Blog Commenting

The real forum users are generally good readers. They have a huge appetite for consuming content and also sharing their opinion on it. Forum owners can can target all the popular blogs in their forum’s domain, go there as soon a new blog post is published and drive the discussion. Later they can share their own blog or forum when the opportunity rises.


4> Word of Mouth

One of the most popular ways that forums get popular is through people sharing it in their circles. The forum owner can not just wait and expect people to talk about the forum to their friends. The forum owner needs to involve the users extensively in forum development by taking their feedback and acknowledging their contributions. This will make them feel a crucial part of the forum and they will go around sharing/promoting their achievements on the forum to others.


5> Keywords

One of the best long term strategies that requires zero investment of money but lot of investment of effort is creating content that is peppered with the right keywords. When you ensure that content on your blog and forum are fully optimized for the right keywords in your domain, you will start getting tons of new users on a regular basis.


6> Social Media

There are many social media platforms that can be leveraged to bring in new users. Depending on the domain your forum is in, you need to target the right platforms which have the most number of users from your target audience. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or LinkedIn; you need to keep hunting for new members and pitching your forum/blog/content to them.


7> Thought Leadership

For your forum to be considered the best in the niche, you must have the best content in your niche. All your content doesn’t need to come from within the forum. You can create top quality material in you domain and quote that in your forum and other forums. All the users in your forum will stumble on your content and will also in the process visit your forum.
 
Last edited:

ziansur

New Member
Start small. It is a common mistake for many users who create a forum to create too many topics or channels. Don't overwhelm the user, especially if it's not needed. Start with a forum with only a few channels (4-6) and then as more channels become needed, create those channels.
 
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