How do you make your forum big?

[Robby]

Content may be king but context is KING KONG.

My site has grown over 300k posts in less than 1.5 year. We discuss watches and let some OT-discussions take place. The OT-discussions is the "glue" that keeps the main focus all together, it keeps people happy.
Also, we're (the three guys running it) not greedy. We've turned down a lot of companies wanting to advertise, because we only want companies that really fit our profile. Therefore not running Adwords either.
We try to run a lot of contests with prices from our sponsors, not keeping them to ourselves that we could have done. This behavior is contagious on the members, we've got people running their own small contests when they reach 1000 posts and so on. We've got a really good mood and feeling on the page, everybody's welcome.

My advice is ...don't be too serious and greedy in the beginning. And yeah, context is king kong.

Can you tell us a little bit more about how it has grown.
Is it just with contests?

 

[Robby]

Just found this, a interview with several big forum owners about their practices. Can't hurt, right?
http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/how-to-keep-a-forum-active/

 

[daviden]

Can you tell us a little bit more about how it has grown.
Is it just with contests?

No, that's just a bonus to keep the moral up.

We listened to the users, applied some changes that the majority wanted. Could be some more spacing in tables, lighter or darker font here and there.
Most important of all, we love what we do. We got into every thread in the beginning, replied with something (not blaha blaha just for the replying sake, real content). And at one point ...the site became organic. It started to live without us, we didn't have to visit every thread to keep it alive.
We still love what we do, and we're very active on the site. We're not the kind of admins that sit back and do nothing.

Also, there was (not the biggest anymore) already a bigger watch site when we started, but we did (and do) it better. Might add, there was no cheating with creating ad-threads for our site on the site that already existed. Users found us, liked what they saw ...and here we are. Passed 315 000 posts today. Over 2 million pageviews/month (not counting Tapatalk traffic).

 

[daviden]

Can you tell us a little bit more about how it has grown.
Is it just with contests?

And yeah, one important thing. We decided in the beginning not to have too many categories.
Figured out that some categories would be "ghost towns" with 20-30 threads, would look really bad.

That's probably my main advice - keep the forum categories down. That will concentrate the users and make them feel like the site is very active, because everybody is at the same place.
We've added more categories along the road, in sync with scaling and demand.