Started a forum, how do I grow it?

[Overload]

Has anyone here ever started a forum of their own? What was your success level? My thinking is an active forum will lead to more views for the main site. It's in its infancy, and I've been actively advertising but that only does so much.

What do you guys recommend? I'm doing a giveaway right now and that helps, even if most of the members joined and posted solely for the chance at winning.

Also, if anyone else here has a forum of their own that needs activity, I propose a post exchange. You sign up for mine and make a certain number of posts and I'll do the same for yours.

http://www.portableplatypus.freeforums.org

[BoringSupreez]

I joined.

Also, if your main site has good, useful articles, the forums will grow on their own.

[emwearz]

Most people will see '.freeforums' or a generic skin and just leave.

[neilencio]

I used to work for an entertainment portal, and one of the challenges we encountered was building a forum in a time where people prefer facebook and tweeter for online discussions (healthy forums like racketboy started before the whole microblogging and social media became a thing, so its pretty much standing on a foundation built when it was much easier.)

You're doing contests and stuff, so that's one thing to attract people.

You also need to start a lot of threads and discussions, guides etc. New users rarely have the initiative to start one on their own in a bare forum, so you might want to do this yourself or create fake identities (*cough*).

It also helps if you can get specific threads/discussions linked from your main site. I imagine that majority of the racketboy posters found the forum through one of the links at the main page.

Another tip that I can give you is to minimize the number of sections while the forum is young. It's going to make it harder for new users to start if they have to bother with thinking where to browse first, or where their specific thread will fit in. There's also the illusion that things look more lively if there is a lot of discussion in one section, instead of one or two threads per section. People are more encouraged to participate in busy places. You can split the sections later when the content grows.

Propagating a forum can be much more complicated than growing a site. Technically, most people just do it by focusing on the site itself, and just creating a forum for it. The forum will grow by itself based on how good the site is at building a relationship with visitors.

[arnold_the_bartender]

I used to have a forum(s). The style of the latest one was all designed from scratch and it was a bomb ass looking forum (we met someone who had awesome art skills). We used invisionfree since it is heavily customizable and much more flexible than free phpBB2 boards (might be different since phpBB3 came out. It's been a while). It never caught on though because it was pretty much undiscovered. The users were mainly me and a group of friends whom I knew online. We met one or two unique people but that's about it. I still have files from my forum running days on my hard drive. What times... but I've since retired managing forums mainly due to me being the only one consistently working on things and trying to make something out of our community, and simply lacking the resources to pay for a web host. I'd do it again if I had the chance but only if I was working with a group that is very serious about starting a community. I can leave you with some advice though.

Even if your forum looks promising, you're going to need a capable team who is willing to work on it with you. People people people. I've learned this the hard way. You won't be able to achieve success if no one is on board. The staff I had wasn't always there (aside from hanging on TeamSpeak, a staff member had one rented for the community) and I was mostly on the forum working on stuff, including managing and updating the forum, writing reviews, organizing, posting guides, basically doing anything I could. I had a life too. You can't do everything and you'll want to have contacts with people who have talents that meet your needs and want to share the common goal of bringing up your community. Find a capable staff, plan ahead, and keep a steady stream of content with the help of members of course, depending on what type of content you want to create and share. If you follow through, you will build a strong following with what you have to offer whilst keeping your forum from being lost in the shuffle. Who knows how many game forums I've seen start and fail that looked promising in the beginning but just weren't meant to be. One this is for sure, don't appear to be desperate. I witnessed this from a lot of other forum admins of other sites that tried taking off doing anything they could do in their power (i.e. begging) to get people to post. Like I said, content to feed the masses. Oh, and timing is important.

neilencio pretty much nailed it. Do not start your forum with an overabundance of sections. New users may feel lost and/or the forum will look desolate if things are spread out in a forum that is just taking off. Start off with small necessary ones. I've always started with a maximum of three sections, Administrative (for Announcement topics which would also show up in the forum portal, News section, and a hidden staff section for staff members to use), General Discussion (Free 4 All, general sections), and a third one if need be (I used to put trashed threads in an archive but it'd be better off for other things). You also don't want your forum to look bland. Come up with a unique design that will attract users and make potential long-time members feel comfortable surfing the forums with.

You will also want to extend your community to third parties including but not limited to social media sites. I used to have a LiveStream channel where I would stream live gameplay and me and my friend would do comedic commentary. You don't necessarily need to pay to advertise. Find plenty of venues and add your forum/site to search engines. Every little bit counts. YouTube is always a hot place to get a community noticed but then again, you'll find tons of other channels there that you'll be competing with for attention.

Opening a forum is much tougher nowadays since they aren't as popular as they used to be. Personally, I prefer forums over social media sites but the general public loves to tweet and spend hours on Facebook. It's similar to ROM sites losing popularity and traffic due to torrents that share fullsets.

This is just a brief writing on some of my experiences. Hopefully it's straightforward and you can understand it. Getting everyone elses perspective on it will help as well seeing as we all dealt with different circumstances. I have three midterms this week. *hits the hay*

[Overload]

Thanks for the advice guys. I've reduced the number of topics and it does look a lot more lively. Hadn't even thought about staff, but I can see why it's so vital.

[retrosportsgamer]

I would strongly consider using DISQUIS as the login method. No one wants 500 logins to different forums. If I can use my one base DISQUIS account (or twitter account through DISQUIS), i'm more likely to return (and remember how the heck to login).

[k.vlaros]

Your first post didn't say what the hook of the forum is, and it's not evident by a glance of the forum index. When I visit your main site (which is as text in the top left of the forum but NOT a hyperlink...), I see you're focus is handheld gaming. OK, maybe I could have parsed that from your URL, but I didn't and URL meanings aren't assumed to be self evident (racketboy?).

My big concern is not that you don't have a proper URL for the forum yet or that the skin is still plain (or that you have a few too many sections-- I'd follow the advice above and consolidate to NEWS, GAMING, OFFTOPIC). Rather, when I browse the main page of your website (http://www.portableplatypus.com/), none of the articles on the front page (seven at the time) have a single comment. Where is your website community- because without a really compelling hook otherwise, your only hope for community is people funneling off of your blog, which currently looks very quiet.

[GSZX1337]

Where's YoshiEgg when you need him?