Instead of churning out a long detailed post related to forum building and promotion methods, I will start a series of posts detailing individual promotion techniques. Here is the first: Effectively using the platform of other forums to promote your own.
(Prerequisite for this forum promotion method is that you have some content and membership at your forum. I recommend only using this technique after you have built up about 100 posts in your forum and have perhaps 10-20 members.)
i. Sign up to three or four established forums within your niche that permit the use of forum signatures. (In order to find established forums in your niche, you can look on sites like:
http://www.big-boards.com/ or use search engine with search strings like: "your niche" + phpbb, or "your niches" + vBulletin.)
ii. Make a few basic posts (many forums offer "Introductions" type subforums where you can introduce yourself and pick up a few quick and easy posts, but also post in other relevant areas of the forum in order to establish a genuine presence at the forum(s).) Some forums require you to make a minimum number of posts before you are permittd to use the signature field; some set this quite high to deter sig-spamming, so only you can tell whether it will be worht the time investment to meet this threshhold for a particular forum.
iii. After a few days, set up the signature in your profile. The choice of text and link in the signature, I have found, is absolutely critical to the success of this method. Remember, we are doing this to drive traffic and hopefully membership to your forum, and not for link building purposes. So, I always recommend that the anchor text for the link should be either a question or some other single sentence designed to elicit a strong response. Likewise, the link target should be a thread on your forum where the question offered in the link anchor is directly relevant. I have found better results are obtained by getting people in to the heart of the forum quickly instead of sending them to the homepage where they have to mess about finding what might be relevant to them. Remember, these are people already participating in a similar forum so it is highly likely they will have something to contribute if you can get them swiftly to the place to do it.
Let me offer a few examples of good signatures to illustrate my point in (iii) above.
Example I - for an NFL forum (this could also work for a rugby football forum)
Anchor text might be: "Are rugby wingers faster that NFL running backs?"
Link target might be: a thread on your forum set up to discuss whether rugby players cross over to the NFL successfully etc.
This would be a highly charged subject sure to elicit a response from many NFL/rugby football fans.
Example II - for a webmaster forum
Anchor text might be: "Forum promotion methods: How I got a 10K member forum"
Link target might be: a thread like this talking about forum promotion.
Site promotion is aloways a hot topic on most busy webmaster forums
Example III - using polls
Most forum packages offer built-in poll functionality and you can directly a poll in to your signature.
Anchor text might be: the actual question given in your poll
Link target: direct link to your poll thread
iv. Continue to post on a weekly basis to the forums, and change your signature once every 2-3 weeks. Monitor results.
I hope this has been useful and i would love to hear of any sucesses, failures of suggested improvements on this method. More in this series to follow over the next weeks.
