How to promote a webmaster forum?

[thevirus]

Forums typically generate revenue through adsense and other affiliate programs. I personally find it hard to promote a webmaster forum though.

I have tried writing articles and submitting them to article directories, posting in similar subject forums, commenting on relevant blogs, submitting to directories, and submitting to social bookmarking services.

I feel that is a pretty good mix of promotion techniques all free. I have also done some forum post trades and that is where most of my posts have come from.

Besides that I am just receiving spam posts that I have to delete. Just wondering if you guys could suggest any other promotional techniques.

[SticKer]

you could try directory, article, social bookmarking submission, etc Some advertising if you can put in some money. you can try adwords or similar programs like adtoll (you can find adtoll link in my signature). i hope that should help bring in some traffic.

[ablaye]

Dude, there are already too many webmaster forums.
I made a mistake starting one also
Best thing you should have done was instead of starting a general webmaster forum, you should have limited your focus on one niche, like forum owners, directory owners, etc...

[wired076]

I also agree that there are many forums out there but only a small amount are successful, many never get of the ground. I am currently trying to promote my own site which has an IT and Electronics Forum on it but at the current time I have had a lull in membership which when I refocus my marketing techniques will pick back up.

[wired076]

I just realised but what is the point in promoting a forum that is not even active??

At least with mine I check it regularly and respond in a promptu manner and if I start getting some posts I check even more regularly and it was just updated too.

[slnet]

hey I know this other webmaster site.. which started to pay people who did valuable post.. 2 cent for a post I think.. people where rushing in and posting all kinds of nice stuff.. and the guy actually paid people who does good posts.. so people where happy they got money as they was told and posted more.. but essentially lost maybe about 20 dollars.. and got 1000 quality topics to talk about.. then once he got what he wanted.. he just announced the pay scheme is over.. but the traffic kept coming because of the quality content he had.. and with the traffic more quality contents too.. so even if one of you guys tries it.. doesn't mean you should expect the same result...

other part is.. if somebody ask you some help and give you access to something.. don't break anything in there.. if you do it will affect the reputation of the site.. and also answer the questions in a timely manner.. and a lot more stuff for a successful webmaster forum, or what i would like to address as webmasters support forum..

[G Media]

hmm... once upon a time I started a webmaster forum, modded the code to hell too! It was an awesome little board....

...and then I just couldn't get the traffic to it....

But I've learnt a lot since then, and the forum in my Sig runs on a permanent Rev-Share basis. Less than a month old and has 600 posts

The whole forum works on a "stock market" of sorts. I designed a script that links the forums earnings to the total CP (Contirbution Points) earned in each day.
The script then adjusts the "exchange rate" so that half of the daily revenue is given to the users

It's kinda neat, only thing is the Paypal Payments are all manual so they're gonna be a buggar to do lol

Anyways, reward schemes like that work well for forums, even if they are only for the first few months. As said above, it's a good idea at first to reall cut down how many categories/sections your forum has.

It might sound silly, but it's better to have 4 very general sections, than a page of 20 different categories and sections but each might only have 10 threads in it, which makes users think it's empty and makes them leave

And finally, sorry to say the obvious but..... you've gotta offer something DIFFERENT!!!!

[G Media]

Oh, if your running VB, theres a pretty popular Adsense Revshare mod. Should pretty much sort out that side of things "straight out of the box"

[SticKer]

i had implemented the ad rev sharing system for this forum sometime back but i didn't get good response.

[G Media]

Sticker - which one? The Adsense one?

Im finding that I need to get really creative with ad placements. Random positioning is essential (so users don't get Ad Blind)