How to encourage people to participate in a forum

[ravel]

Hi,

I am running a small forum for about a year. The forum has about ~700 posting so there is already some food for google to bring people on my website.
But there is hardly no one who participates in my forum. I get about 100 unique visitors a day due to search engines (mostly google) but all they do is reading my content and clicking my ads (what is a good thing ).

I am already allowing posting for guests so a registration is no longer needed to start threads.
I have a quite amout of backlinks (180 due to yahoo's site info) and the ranking for my most important keywords is good.

What is the golden rule to make a forum a vital forum?

[StarBuG]

There are a few methods to encourage users to register and take part in discussions.

• Create interesting and engaging topics
• Offer help and advice
• Start a contest with prices
• Often reducing forum numbers to a bar minimum (like 10 or less) increases activity
• Content, content, content

But that is always a difficult task

[ravel]

Hi,

thanks StarBug for your reply.

After 4 month my forum has grown a little.
The post counter raised to ~2.000 and the unique visitors per day to ~150.

I am still allowing people to post in the forum without the need of being registered.

I followed the most of your rules:

• Create interesting and engaging topics (i hired writer to post good articles)
• Offer help and advice (i do this)
• Start a contest with prices (i have coded a plugin that shows the most liked (vbseo's Like system) person within a week. this user gets a price each week. but no one is using the like-system )
• Often reducing forum numbers to a bar minimum (like 10 or less) increases activity (i did it)
• Content, content, content (see point 1. i hired writers to create high quality content)

But my forum didn't reach the point where it grows on its own. I still have to push it.
I only get about 1-2 new threads per day which isn't much.

At the moment I am trying out google adwords for about 5 Euro per day which brings some more visitors to my site. But I am thinking that it would be a better choice to invest the 5 Euro/day into more content.

I am still looking for some tips to increase the posting rate of my users (about 300 registered users).

What kind of contests have you startet? My like-system-contest have not been accepted by the users yet :-/

Thanks
ravel

[JamesColin]

Hi, perhaps try to create a BIG graphic button which says something like "HAVE A QUESTION? Get a professional answer for free almost instantly!" which goes to the posting form, to create a new thread. Make the form easy with titles such as "YOUR QUESTION" instead of "subject" and "ADD DETAILS TO HELP US GIVE YOU THE MOST PROFESSIONAL ANSWER QUICKLY" instead of "message"..

I mean try to make it obvious that your site will help them in their quest or any question they have and that they'd be better off spending 5 minutes posting their question instead of keeping on looking for an answer online which they might not find.

Just an idea.