Advertising? Gaining members?

[Shawn Gossman]

Hello,
So my website is complete and I started to advertise on Facebook. I did this for a week, and got no sign ups. How do you guys advertise your site? How do you get people to your site?

I am very new to forums, and would appreciate all help.

Thanks,
Noah

I'm quite successful with Facebook advertising, however, I developed a fairly large fan-base before actually buying adverts. My forum's FB page is about to hit 10,000 fans. I communicate with my fans regularly and post unique content to ensure that it doesn't always link back to my forum. Basically, you have to make another community but on Facebook instead of on your forum. Then develop an active forum where discussions are contributing to the niche you are focusing on and go from there. However, I had a little help... I acquired my competition last year and their FB page as well, that boosted membership when I merged the forum into mine and boosted social fans when I merged the FB page into my forum's page. In about a week, my forum became the largest forum within that specific niche in the world... We're #1 That helps a lot too, if there is a lot of competition, it WILL be harder to do.

Be sure to use all the advertising features such as advertising to those based on targeted interests where you supply keywords about the niche. Also, longer advertisements tend to be more effective from my experience. I usually spend anywhere from $30 to $150 (pending the type of advertisement) and set them up to display for 7 days. One ad ($150 spent in 7 day period) gave me anywhere from 20-100 members a day, a few days with 100 members, it was nice! The ad was also shared several hundred times which also helped. I notice when I request people share the ad, they share it more than when I do not request the ad to be shared. I also use hashtags in the ad to reach more people. Images are important as well, great eye catching images!

I hope my information helps!

 

[countryside]

I'm quite successful with Facebook advertising, however, I developed a fairly large fan-base before actually buying adverts. My forum's FB page is about to hit 10,000 fans. I communicate with my fans regularly and post unique content to ensure that it doesn't always link back to my forum. Basically, you have to make another community but on Facebook instead of on your forum. Then develop an active forum where discussions are contributing to the niche you are focusing on and go from there. However, I had a little help... I acquired my competition last year and their FB page as well, that boosted membership when I merged the forum into mine and boosted social fans when I merged the FB page into my forum's page. In about a week, my forum became the largest forum within that specific niche in the world... We're #1 That helps a lot too, if there is a lot of competition, it WILL be harder to do.

Be sure to use all the advertising features such as advertising to those based on targeted interests where you supply keywords about the niche. Also, longer advertisements tend to be more effective from my experience. I usually spend anywhere from $30 to $150 (pending the type of advertisement) and set them up to display for 7 days. One ad ($150 spent in 7 day period) gave me anywhere from 20-100 members a day, a few days with 100 members, it was nice! The ad was also shared several hundred times which also helped. I notice when I request people share the ad, they share it more than when I do not request the ad to be shared. I also use hashtags in the ad to reach more people. Images are important as well, great eye catching images!

I hope my information helps!

Thank you so much, you would not believe how much this helps me. I am curious, how big was the competitor you acquired and what was a general cost (if your willing to let me know). I am thinking of this one competitor, and may look into an acquisition.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I paid over $1,000.00 for the forum. It doubled my membership from about 3,000 to 6,000 members. Since that, we've went well past 7,000 members. The competing forum was not as active as mine but it was still the first. It is over 10 years old, mine was about 4 years old at the time. I wasn't even interested in buying it until a member of my forum sent me a PM telling me the owner was trying to sell it. I figured he want a lot for it, the price was still high but I took it. Now I have the largest Skywarn Storm Spotter forum in the world, literally, that is a pretty cool thing to be able to claim.

We were powered by SMF first, then converted to IPS, after the merger, I converted to XenForo. The competing forum was VB 3.8.

Yet another win for XF, the biggest Skywarn Forum online is XF powered

 

[NetDoc]

Getting a forum started is brutal. Don't lose hope. Create a few sock puppets and talk to yourself. Just don't misspell the same words or use the same catch phrases! Share every post on FB sure, but don't pay them squat. Encourage, cajole, bribe, con and convince your friends and acquaintances to post, post, post. Give away a t-shirt for the best/most prolific poster. Heck, you could give it to a sock puppet and peeps would be none the wiser.