Help Needed : Forum Populating

I wrote this guide on this subject on my ForumSearch website, i hope it helps.

Quote: Gaining Members So you're getting visitors to your forum but nobody seems to be joining as a member. Don't worry this happens to just about every new forum and quite a lot of established forums. Although there is no magic formula as to getting people to sign up there are a few things that can be done to help the process. To start with your forum must look good. If the design of your forum makes it difficult to read and/or navigate people aren't going to bother even trying. I wouldn't, would you? The main things that put off potential members is the background colour of the forum and the text colour. If the background colour is to bright, like a shocking pink, guests will find it difficult to concentrate on anything else that your forum has to offer and will probably end up with a headache. You must follow this rule with the font colour on your forum. The text of your forum must also be a decent size, nothing less than font 10. the worst thing that you can possibly do is to mix these two 'rules' and have a background colour and text colour that merge. If you have a dark blue background, don't use black as a text colour. The second thing that has to be done is to make sure that your forum has posts. Think about it, if for example you went to a website and the homepage was just a blank page would you stick around and look at the rest of the site? Of course you wouldn't and the same goes for forums. If there is nothing for people to look at they'll go somewhere where there is. Although having posts is a key element in getting members you must also make sure that t he content in fresh. If you have a few posts in every category but they have been the same since you started people won't keep coming back and they wont join. This is because when people use a forum it is a way of interacting with people and finding out new information or getting other people's views but if nobody is posting on your forum non of this can be accomplished

Are you getting visitors or not? That's a big turning point. First you need to get people to your site through regular SEO and site promotion techniques. As the previous post stated, it's also really important to at least look like you're busy. There are a number of ways to do this - post lots of threads yourself, ask your friends to come and post etc. One really common mistake is to create too many forums at first. If you can condense it down into fewer forums your post counts will be higher.

I honestly don't think that design has a whole lot to do with it. I've been involved in some very large, very active but very ugly forums. If you have something that people want to talk about they won't care about that (and non designers usually don't notice it as much as we do). One other way to get people talking is to post controversial threads right up front, or at least things that everyone in your target audience would have an opinion on.

HTH!

Thank you both, i'll take all those ideas in, and tweak my forum.

thanks again

I've had the same questions, but I've been lucky, as I've now got 128 members to my forum in just 4 weeks.

The best advice I can give you is pimp out your forum to your friends, make the place fun, and they will tell people about it. Viral marketing at it's best.