How Do You Start?

[Calamity]

Obviously using post exchanges can help, but how do you populate your forum with posts? You make them on 1 account? You switch between accounts you’ve created? Also how do you go about your initial recruitment… what other sites do you utilize?

 

[Cedric]

There's several options.

1. You create fake accounts and make conversations between those.
2. You create content, lots of it from your own account, and hope others will start participating once they join.
3. You do exchanges with other forum admins.
4. You purchase Content Bundles.


But do understand the niche you have chosen is a very specific and hard niche. I admire your braveness and passion, but know it won't be an easy ride.

 

[Cory]

Participate in similar communities and advertise in your profile/signature when allowed hoping others will follow your link and join and participate in your forum. Also, you could try affiliation with similar communities too. Content is king, keep it coming in and hopefully you'll find interest along the way. I'm not big on social media, but you could also utilize that for promotion.

I know you're speaking primarily about content and I'm primarily speaking about promotion, but in the end, both go hand in hand to help your forum grow.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I start off my adding as much content to my community, and make sure every sub forum has at least one thread. From there I participate in post exchanges to help get some more members, and I might promote the forum or community to a few select people to get things ready before revealing the community to the public.

 

[Reverie]

I try to find 2-3 people I know personally to help me begin creating threads. Begin with the popular threads that people would enjoy participating. Then request a content bundle like @Cedric recommended. After doing this, begin advertising. Make sure to include a great promo image in your signature and post around some communities. For your specific niche, I would try to find music/general communities to post around and get to know people and perhaps if they see your signature they will find enough of an interest to join. (Definitely do not PM advertise or anything lol... but sometimes just being seen can be enough)

I would also find TikToks or Facebook Groups where you could maybe mention your community or follow some other fansites to get a follow for follow type of deal to get your community some traffic.

 

[Empire]

It's a long road and at times you going to end up having a good and bad day like anyone else and that's part of running a site, expect things not to go right as you expected and learn from those mistakes and learn to improve for the future. Try not to think about your numbers and engage with your members, I have seen so many sites that have 150 members and are very small however they make over 50 to 200 posts a day.

1. I would consider going to sites like AJ or FP and do posting exchanges with people, or build yourself up on those sites to get credits to spend our credits for your site. As long as you read the rules based on where you go, just in case.
2. Same as above but pay people to join and post around If you have the cash
3. Social media can help regards promoting your site, and using them. Make accounts set them up and use them to link your Forum, I have RSS feed with little update feeds going to all my social media accounts with the link going back to the site
4. I do NOT highly recommend this but make multiple accounts and post on each of those accounts.

 

[cdub]

My similar band fan site doesn't have much activity yet but I had a ton of fun making it.

I've had a handful of people sign up and post but not much.

Granted I haven't had much time to put into it since it launched because of my real job and also my regular forum which makes fun projects like this possible.

I'll have time this Thanksgiving break to put more work into it probably as I'm off from work.

 

[Calamity]

My similar band fan site doesn't have much activity yet but I had a ton of fun making it.

I've had a handful of people sign up and post but not much.

Granted I haven't had much time to put into it since it launched because of my real job and also my regular forum which makes fun projects like this possible.

I'll have time this Thanksgiving break to put more work into it probably as I'm off from work.

I used to love that band (Live). If you decide to start making a push again, let me know

 

[cdub]

I used to love that band (Live). If you decide to start making a push again, let me know

Just posted a new article today.

If you'd like to register and review some of their music in our database that'd be awesome.

Līve Music Catalog

Rate and review your favorite from the band Līve

viciouscrowd.com

Sadly I don't know too much about blink 182 to return the favor but I'll check out the site.

 

[~ True Legend ~]

There's several options.

1. You create fake accounts and make conversations between those.
2. You create content, lots of it from your own account, and hope others will start participating once they join.
3. You do exchanges with other forum admins.
4. You purchase Content Bundles.


But do understand the niche you have chosen is a very specific and hard niche. I admire your braveness and passion, but know it won't be an easy ride.

As for P1, @Nebulous uses alt accounts to start threads. I don’t like the idea of creating multiple accounts all pretending to be different ppl though as I’d rather uphold a standard of integrity and have less members than have member counts inflated a bunch of bogus accounts

 

[Nebulous]

As for P1, @Nebulous uses alt accounts to start threads. I don’t like the idea of creating multiple accounts all pretending to be different ppl though as I’d rather uphold a standard of integrity and have less members than have member counts inflated a bunch of bogus accounts

To be fair we don't have "a bunch" we have 2 accounts. Both have special rank banners to differentiate them from regular members and are only used to create new discussion threads, not to engage with the members or have conversations with people.

They aren't used much these days but are available so staff don't have to feel like they are over-saturating the forum. It gives members a little bit of a variety not seeing the same person creating every single discussion thread on the forum.

 

[~ True Legend ~]

To be fair we don't have "a bunch" we have 2 accounts. Both have special rank banners to differentiate them from regular members and are only used to create new discussion threads, not to engage with the members or have conversations with people.

They aren't used much these days but are available so staff don't have to feel like they are over-saturating the forum. It gives members a little bit of a variety not seeing the same person creating every single discussion thread on the forum.

3 - Olivia and Randy are both bots right? So those 2 and @Nebulous

 

[Husk]

So how I would do it was to make sure every single forum had at least one topic in it for people to engage with. When I was a part of a couple RP resource forums, my job was basically the community manager. So I would be the one starting topics for members to reply to and replying to anything the members made. I used to really enjoy it!