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PunBB Forums → General discussion → How to make a forum successful?
What do you do to get members, activity and traffic to your forum? Post here and share your techniques.
If I were to make a new forum, firstly I would hire good staff, then make sure they know their jobs/tasks. Then I would go about advertising, good ways of advertising: word of mouth (online messengers), banners, sig adverts, referal systems. The rest is down to how well you run the forums, and keeping the members active and interested.
The first thing I would do is ask myself, "do people need this forum?", if they do, people will come automatically. Another thing to think about is to start small, add one forum and then go from there. There's few things that scare away visitors more than 20 forums which are pretty much empty.
The first thing I would do is ask myself, "do people need this forum?"
Thats something I also was going to mention, so many pointless forum out there.
i make articles like how to re-encode video for internet distrabution as well as some video card driver compairison articles, and alot of game articles, people love downloads too, ok, so what does this have to do with forums? well, people would come and view those, then join, and comment and various other things, basically it will bring people, but without a staff, its also hard to run a forum, let alone a website that gets large - its hard to find a dependable staff too.
after making the articles i knew i was a member of other forums all around the net, so i added links to these articles in my forum signature' and people would come when they saw them.
do people need this forum, is a great idea too!
i make articles like how to re-encode video for internet distrabution as well as some video card driver compairison articles, and alot of game articles, people love downloads too.
Thats how alot of websites do it, if there were no articles or downloads people wouldn't join.
some dont come to your website/forums unless you post fresh news, so always have news on your subject.
The Admin Zone is a great resource for this sort of matter (I know I mention it a lot, but I swear I'm not spamming), even if it does run on vBulliten. 
I will say that in terms of first impressions:
a) You have a lot of announcement forums and other mundane stuff placed at the top of the forum listing. Generally, you want the most interesting forums up top to attract visitors' attention.
b) You have quite a few forums, which both makes scrolling from the top to the bottom a pain and spreads postcounts out too much, thus making your board seem less active than it is.
c) It's not that apparent what the board is about.
I hope that helps!
I actually have checked out that site before, it is very nice admin zone.
Mattk good job on fourth street, very good work.
a) You have a lot of announcement forums and other mundane stuff placed at the top of the forum listing. Generally, you want the most interesting forums up top to attract visitors' attention.
Thats a very good point, I try and do that whenever i'm starting a forum from scratch.
Thanks towelie, good comments are always nice to see 
The first thing I would do is ask myself, "do people need this forum?", if they do, people will come automatically. Another thing to think about is to start small, add one forum and then go from there. There's few things that scare away visitors more than 20 forums which are pretty much empty.
start with a punbb forum ?
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