Methods of Advertising Your Forum
When it comes to advertising your forum, you would want to the least expensive way possible. There are many free ways to advertise your forum however you have to invest a lot of time into it.
For free advertising, you can manually optimize your forum or web site into search engines, post on other forums with a link in your signature, post in blogs, Digg articles, humble links, word of mouth, and more.
You can also invest money into advertising to get more members, and most of the time it is affective. You can pay to get advertisements emplaced on other web sites or forums, pay for forum posters to post on other forums related to your topic in the signature link (note that some forums will not allow this and the links will be deleted). You can also gain more traffic to your forum through posting a referral competition on your forum if it is already partially popular with real members (not paid posters) who are at least partially active. If you have a dead forum, you may want to send an e-mail to all your members to remind them of the forum and let them know that it is returning to popularity and there are contests available for people to win various prizes (most popular is electronics, gift cards and cash).
If you decide to get paid posters to post on other forums, here is a good guide to make sure you get the best for your money:
- The average paid poster for your forum is .05-.20 a post
- The average paid poster on other forums to link to yours is .20-.30
- The average paid blogger will charge differently depending on the blog`s traffic and Google Page Rank
- Make sure all the forums that you get the paid poster to post on allow clickable links, advertising your own forum even if it is on topic, has active members, a lot of traffic and a page rank is always a bonus
- Give the paid poster the code for the signature link and make sure he posts proof upon completion
- The job should be spread across a longer period of time, preferably a month to allow the majority of the active members to see the link
- The more forums that your forum is advertised on, the better.
- The average amount of posts per forum are 10-20 posts a day for a month, however it may differ depending on how popular and active the forum is
