My goal is to have hundreds and then thousands of active members here at the forums.

Looks like I got my work cut out for me. ;)

My goal is to have hundreds and then thousands of active members here at the forums.

Looks like I got my work cut out for me. ;)

That's a good goal, but how do you plan to achieve it.

Good question! Right now I'm experimenting with various forms of paid advertising to find out what's effective. Over the long term, I plan to do whatever I can to make it a great forum. Eventually, I guess it will spread by word of mouth. At least I hope it will.

It looks like the forum is growing pretty fast. When did you start the site?

I found this place a few days ago and I registered today. I hope to meet lots of like-minded people here.

Hoping and doing do not necessarily equate to the same thing. Have you documented your plan in an outline form so that you have a better idea of the direction you will go?
Have you taken the time to create a set of objectives so that you can measure your progress?

It looks like the forum is growing pretty fast. When did you start the site?

I found this place a few days ago and I registered today. I hope to meet lots of like-minded people here.
It has only been open for a week or so. I'm doing targeted advertising for it, so more and more like-minded people should be coming.

Hoping and doing do not necessarily equate to the same thing. Have you documented your plan in an outline form so that you have a better idea of the direction you will go?
Have you taken the time to create a set of objectives so that you can measure your progress?
No, I'm just sort of winging it right now. But you are right, I need to take the time to do these things!

Mini-goals! (this feels weird after just writing an 'anti-goals' post, but this isn't about success, it's about real world stuff)

Set milestones for yourself. Seriously.

100 members: what will it take to get here, what will the community need at this point, how can I ensure that members stay happy and active, and get others involved?
250 members: ditto
500 members: ditto

Honestly. I grew a forum for 50 members to 12,000 in less than a year. Milestones help incredibly, otherwise you lose focus.

Jeremy,

Just curious, what forum was that? That's quite a feat. Congrats.

Yeah, that is quite a feat. And good advice too.

It was a Lord of the Rings forum. It died out after I sold it *L* (guy had a database crash he never recovered from)

It's probaby still out there ... www.ringquest.com

Must've been really popular before Return of the King came out. That's a pretty good idea for a site. Are you a big fan yourself?

It was actually post-release. It was more popular than the official LOTR site.

I wasn't a big fan at all actually, bought it and built it for the money :)

Are you using Google Adsense or something else?

Also, are you tracking your registrations by source? vBulletin 3 allows you to do this if you set it up right.

Don't know if you are asking me, but yes I am using Adwords. How do you use tracking?? The only way I know to do it is to use my own referrer id. But are you saying you can have multiple urls to track for different ads?

Set up a fake user... lets say you name him Adwords.

Now lets say Adwords has a referrer ID of http://www.successvibe.com/index.php?referrerid=33

Go into your Google Adwords account and update the link to address. Instead of using successvibe.com use http://www.successvibe.com/index.php?referrerid=33 with the shown URL to be www.successvibe.com

Then you can look up your member accounts every now and then and view how many referrals that user has.
You can also do this for signature files. Make a sitepoint.com user and enter that referrerid into your sig file.

Its a great tracking too so you can figure out where your leads are coming form...

Excellent! Thanks Nathan!

The problem I face when trying to advertise my board is, I cannot afford to advertise. I have to use the free methods.

i.e. relying on search engine bots/spiders to crawl my board and enter them on the search engine.

I tried Yahoo once for a few days, but my page just dropped off very quickly as I only had a tiny budget.

I just need a 100% pay rise. :D

Not having any advertising budget is certainly not an easy way to go. I don't have a very large one, but I can't imagine trying to do it without one at all. Keep the faith!!

Hi Tom,

100 members: what will it take to get here, what will the community need at this point, how can I ensure that members stay happy and active, and get others involved?
250 members: ditto
500 members: ditto


I would add another important element to the plan: When

When will you have 100 members
When will you have 200...

and 500, 1000, 5000, 10000?

My goal is to have hundreds and then thousands of active members here at the forums.

Looks like I got my work cut out for me. ;)Yup, it looks like you are off to a good start.

A question for you.

Because it's so much of a "what's in it for me" mindset that envelopes the world, what incentives do you offer those currently here, to bring others to this forum as well? What are your Unique Selling Points? (besides all the little smilies you can attach:-) :yippee: :lildevil: :yikes: :D :biglaugh: :thumb:

LOL at the smileys. Great questions though.

Well you know, there is a built in referral system. If you go to the FAQ and go to General Forum Usage--->What are referrals?, it will actually tell you your unique referral id.

And I've thought about paying for referrals, but haven't figured out how to do it, because it would be easy to get ten people to sign up that never participate. That could get expensive fast. So would I have to make it that you get paid after your referral makes 10 posts or whatever number? The referral system doesn't keep track of all that to my knowledge, so it could get really messy I think. I will check into a possible hack for that though. So I really have no idea how to incentivize bringing others here, but I'm going to find out what the possibilities are.

As to the Unique Selling Points, this is a fantastic question, and I'm glad you asked. Because I have not even thought of it until you did.

My idea went as far as opening a forum site to discuss success, a large online mastermind group, so to speak. And then promote it like crazy. The first few days, I had two forums, a success forum and an open (off topic) forum. Then somebody pointed out how ridiculous that was and I changed it.

So anyway, I have no idea what my USP is YET.

Of course any suggestions regarding either question, are more than welcome!

Well, one USP could be a friendly forum where we can actually discuss being successful and has useful posts. If we keep this place well moderated without being oppressive, then we can create an awesome environment. On other forums I run, I achieve this by having a variety of forum rooms, and then moving off topic posts to the appropriate room. I usually move rather than delete so that it doesn't upset someone who is posting, yet maintains order. (People are more understanding when you move their stuff rather than delete it.) So I see that in itself is an awesome USP.

Then later on as we grow, perhaps we can create a resource center with links to things our readers find useful. We can also perhaps have an online newsletter with articles that people can read about being successful. There are thousands of authors writing on the subject that have really good articles they want published and will allow us to do so for free just so they can have a link to their website at the end of the article.

And, over time, we can generate other things for our readers. We will have to just listen carefully to what they want.

Good ideas!

I'm working on implementing an article system now where members can submit their own articles as Scarlet Warrior suggested. It's a pain to set this up, so it might be a while.

Actually it's easy to set up that users can submit articles and just have it be in a forum. But I have something else in mind that will require a lot of customization to the templates. So I may just set it up as a forum first, and do the rest later.

I think this will be a great addition to the forum. Also, I agree with IAFPO about the USPs. I think another selling point is that the forum has a great design and there are no banner ads plastered all over the place.

And no pop-ups, thank goodness! :)