A forum demands that members be all that they can be. Most forum owners go out of their way to encourage members to be active and make their forum great for more members to join. Encouraging membership in a message board may not be an easy task for many people, but it is not impossible or even close to it. There are many different methods that a forum owner can use to build his forum membership and make his forum an active online community.
Start with the content
When you open your new forum, it will be slow at first unless you have a team of members ready to help you get started. If you don’t have that kind of equipment, it will be necessary for you to start everything. You should start by treating the forum like a blog. Start creating new themes, themes that are not found anywhere else but still add something of value. Imagine that people read them but do not comment on them. Create all the topics you want every day and post them frequently. This can be a common practice for the first few days or even weeks of your online forum. You should focus on filling your forum with lots of content for readers to comment on if they decide to join the forum. If there is no content in the forum, is it really worth joining the forum? You can’t just make a forum and expect members to do all the work – that’s not how it works!
Exchanges and publishing services
One way to get members to one forum is to help another forum in exchange for posts. A post swap is when you post to another forum and the forum owner matches the number of your posts on your forum. It’s like the old saying, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back! When posting trades you should always make high quality posts on other forums because you will likely get it in return. The other great advantage of post exchanges is that you can usually post your forum link in your signature as well and that could attract more members. You can also try services like Post Loop, where you post to other forums for points while allowing you to list your forum for posting. Post Loop has a rating system, so the posters are likely to offer higher quality posts because they want a higher rating from you.
Develop good relationships
Once you start getting real members, you need to start developing friendships with them. If you develop great friends on your forum, those friends will be loyal members as they will want to chat with you. It’s a good idea to keep them on your forum, so don’t provide messaging addresses or personal social media addresses, the websites that would allow them to chat with you outside of your forum! You should also treat very loyal members well! Don’t let them abuse the rules or anything like that, but consider their suggestions and try to make them as happy as possible. Once you have a good group of loyal members, you can request that they invite their friends to help you build a bigger forum. Loyal friends will help their friends!
Become an expert
Make yourself known in your niche by becoming an expert in it. Join other related forums, not to advertise, but to get noticed for that niche. Blog about your niche so that more and more people see more about you in association with the niche. If you enjoy writing, post a couple of free niche e-books, videos, and articles on article sites like this one. Another good thing is to develop relationships with the other experts in a niche and befriend them, good friends. Other people will start to notice this and want to develop a relationship with you! Sooner or later, the people who read this part of the article will seek to develop a relationship with you, the niche expert.