A forum demands that members be able to be all that they can be. Most forum owners do their best to encourage members to be active and make their forum great for more members to join. Encouraging membership in a message board may not be an easy task for many people, but it is not impossible or close to impossible. There are many different methods that a forum owner can use to encourage membership in their forum and grow their forum into an active online community.
Start with content
When you launch your new forum, it will be slow at first unless you have a team of members ready to help you launch it. If you don’t have that kind of equipment, it will take you to start everything. You should start by treating the forum like a blog. Start making new tracks, tracks that can’t be found anywhere else but still add something valuable. Pretend people read them but don’t comment. Make as many topics as you want each day and post them often. This can be common practice for the first few days or even weeks that your forum is online. You should focus on filling your forum with plenty of content for readers to comment on if they decide to join the forum. If there is no content on the forum, is it really worth joining the forum? You can’t create a forum and expect members to do all the work, that’s not how it works!
Exchanges and publishing services
One way to get members in a forum is to help another forum in exchange for posts. A post swap is when you post in another forum and the owner of the forum matches the number of your posts in your forum. It’s like the old saying, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back! When doing post trades, you should always make high quality posts on other forums because you are likely to get them in return. The other great thing about post exchanges is that you can usually post your forum link in your signature as well and that might attract more members. You can also try services like Post Loop where you post to other forums to earn points while allowing you to list your forum to be posted on. Post Loop has a rating system, so publishers are likely to provide higher quality posts because they want a higher rating from you.
Develop great relationships
Once you start getting real members, you should start developing friendships with them. If you develop great friends on your forum, those friends will be loyal members as they will want to chat with you. It’s a good idea to keep them on your forum, so don’t provide messaging addresses or personal social media addresses, i.e. the websites that would allow them to chat with you outside of your forum! You should always treat very loyal members well too! Don’t let them abuse the rules or anything like that, but take their suggestions into account and try to make them as happy as possible. Once you get a good group of loyal members, you can ask them to invite their friends to help you expand the forum. Loyal friends will help their friends!
Become an expert
Make yourself known in your niche by becoming an expert in it. Join other related forums, not to advertise, but to become known in that niche. Write a blog about your niche so that more and more people see more about you in association with the niche. If you like to write, post a couple of free niche ebooks, videos, and articles on article sites like this one. Another good thing is to develop relationships with the other experts in a niche and become friends with them, good friends. Other people will start to notice this and want to develop a relationship with you! Sooner or later, the people reading this part of the article will be looking to develop a relationship with you, the niche expert.