how do you grow a forum?
 

No, it's not another webmaster forum. It's a forum about shemales.
Any suggestions on how to grow it, bring in more posters, etc.?

contests, search engine ads?

Give it lots of sun, water it daily and add some fertilizer plant food like Miracle Grow.

Manure, sunlight and lots and lots of water...

hire some cheaper posters to create threads and SEO the site to bring in organic traffic

Have you tried surfing shemale blogs and leaving comments for the blog owners to come check it out? Could get a lot of posters if you allow sigs and/or ref codes, but obviously you would want to establish some ground-rules.

In this day and age, it's almost impossible to grow a forum. I'm not saying it's impossible, it is just really difficult. With the blog formats blowing up and forums already established with cliques...it's going to be a tough road.

I have a mainstream forum and was extremely lucky getting my members. It's a sports forum and the one I had posted on since '97 shut its doors in 2007. I quickly started a new forum with the same format and invited everyone over when they closed their doors. Instant 1,000 members.

Before that I tried to start a forum and paid quite a bit of money outsourcing posters. They ended up posting the most horrible garbage I have ever seen in my entire life! It was straight up crap. Avoid that service at all costs unless you've seen the quality of their work.

beat me to it :mad::mad::mad:

1. Find yourself some shemales
2. Get them to post on your forum
3. Profit!

It all starts with trading something valuable for the magic beans.

Google Blog Search - Post quality comments on blogs on the same subject as your forum.

That's how I started my mainstream forum and it's extremely active these days. :)

:2 cents: ...

Just let the shemale moderators do all the work :)

I actually do have the shemales, since all the T-girls from AmateurDough are posting on the blog, and actively promoting it in their twitters. But we've gotten just 60 members. I thought it'd grow a lot faster since we're also linking to it from inside our members areas.

what do you guys think of making some galleries to promote the forum and submit them via chameleon? would TGP owners allow them?

Paid posters are a good start. The real problem is non-posting members not actually the number of members :winkwink:

Growing a forum now would be pretty difficult I would think unless it's full of stolen content.

Make people join to see images if you have that option. I've joined forums out of frustration that only members could see the posted images.

Beat me to it you spunky bastard.

you create half a dozen fake profiles and start posting

I'd say get posting youtube videos watermarked and with the url in the info section, but it's not quite mainstream enough.

give them incentive to sign up and post... gotta signup to see attachments and get the shemales attaching photos and run a contest of some kind, offer 1 free month membership or something. signature spam on other forums as well.

I think forums are "old hat" now, very static and dated. You should consider some sort of social networking script, there's more interactivity and people are more comfortable with Facebook style sites now. Shemales know how to use Facebook and there are a couple of well established tranny (nearly social networking type sites) already around. There's also a risk of looking too "corporate" or just pushing "your thing" and that will put people off.

I should preface that with "starting from here" I'd go with social networking and not a forum. Established forums have mileage.

With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.

spunky bastard!!

haha I love it

Good boy, next we will learn about "letters" and "numbers" and "how to avoid living in institutions"

Yay! :winkwink:

C'mon this is totally "shemale"
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.

Make fake psts or pay others too

Maybe it's the time difference, maybe you're on drugs, maybe I'm on drugs, but I don't have a clue what you're on about. OMG "pretty maids" !!

Build some bots.

execute your competition:2 cents:

turn off sigs and get backlinks. You will end up with real users instead of spam bots

enable sigs user by user

vbulletin + vbseo + educating your members to use longtail keyphrases in post-titles works wonders.

Just invite fatfoo over

I'd love to see the mess he could make with 20 bots all posting in each others threads :helpme

make it a tube ...

You create a product that attracts a lot of people.

To start, you will need some excrement.