I have started the webmaster forum webcomsoForums.com on May 2008. Its been a lot of fun working with the forum; specially the fact that I can chat with lot of like-minded people. Forums are great to keep us informed whats going on in the industry we are in.

Marketing a forum is real tough. Specially new forum owners without any other established sites get real hard time marketing it. Main reason for that is, there are many other already established forums in the niche your forum is.

Problems with new forums include:

• Not much people join
• If people join, they don’t actively participate
• People leave after a few days

Why does these happen? Did you think about these problems putting yourself in your possible visitors shoes?

People don’t like about forums:

• Slow load time
• Non-sense design
• Ads everywhere
• Empty forum
• No active users online.
• Not much posts.
• Lots of threads with no replies.

A big percentage of your wanna-signup people would look at your stats first to see how active the forum is. People would ignore the cheesy design of a forum if they find it active and useful. Put it another way, everybody love to be a part of the something successful not something new and unsure.

Marketing forum does not mean only advertising to the outside world on other sites; it also means taking care of your own house.

Based on my experience here are some BASIC tips you may find useful for marketing your forum.

• Never open a forum on a niche you don’t have good knowledge on. There are lot of already successful forums on almost any niche you can think of. And you gonna be competing with them. If you don’t have knowledge on the niche, you will fail to give people good info. Specially at the beginning its gonna be you helping out people.
• Post useful info. Think of your forum as the source of good info on the niche. Fill it up with good info.
• Make a few accounts. Login using several computers and browsers to make the forum look active.
• Get your friends join you.
• Make a list of authority forums in the same niche as yours, post on them regularly. Be kind and helpful, people would come look at your forum. Trust me this is the best marketing you can do for your forum.
• Run posting contests. Start with small money. At the beginning there would be few people joining the contest. Once more people get interested, you can raise the prizes. This is your give away to your loyal users. From my experience Revenue Sharing does not work; it does not make enough reason for people post on your forum and be active.
• If you have any other sites, link to your forum.
• Find the social bookmarking sites that are RELATED to your niche. Submit your pages there. This will attract some targeted traffic.

These are basic tips. Not really a detailed marketing tips. There are so many other ways to market a forum. Forums in general takes more then a year to take off. You have to hang in there for that time. If after that time you don’t see enough progress, think you better analyze what you been doing wrong and fix it; if you can’t its time for you quit.

Edit: Feb 17, 2010

After little less then 2 years this is the stats for webcosmoforums.com

Threads: 14,657, Posts: 116,893, Members: 5,892, Active Members: 1,940

I am not too happy with the signup total; but current rate of signup its quite good. End of 1010 we are hoping to have 15000 members.

The earnings are better now. We relied mostly on adsense at the beginning, now we have moved to another ad network buysellads. The forum is now making enough money to cover expenses for hosting, marketing, contests.