How did you attract your initial audience to your forum?

[zappaDPJ]

Most of the forums I've started have an audience ready and waiting to join.

This forum is a prime example of what I mean by that. It serves a purpose. It didn't need sock puppets, post exchanges, SEO tricks or anything else to gain traction. If a forum provides a service or is unique within a niche it'll grow pretty quickly.

The majority of new forums fail, especially today because they have nothing new to offer. What I'm suggesting is the easier route to success is to find the audience first and then give them a forum that they are compelled to join.

The downside of course is it's likely you'll end up running a forum with content you have little interest in but if community building is your thing, this has always worked for me.

 

[Mike Fara]

I think many of us have been in the situation where we found a topic area that we are passionate about, created a well thought out forum structure to accommodate it, released the forum, and then realized we need to put in effort to market our forum, so to speak, to get the ball rolling and to get that initial user base.

As I have recently set up a few new forums, I would love to hear about this part of the journey from other people further down the path. For those of you who did not start with an audience to leverage, how did you get your first 100 forum users?

Windows Vista

 

[Nettpreneur]

Started mines about 2 years ago, currently at 1600 members plus, some signed up orgenically, while I used Micro tasks sites like TimeBucks and SproutGigs to get some on board.
Overall it's been an amazing experience, and I'm focused on spreading the word and growing my forum. Nothing good comes easy, but I'm sure not quitting

 

[neelayza]

It was mainly about programming. Firstly, question and answer topics provided activity. Afterwards, members started producing content.
I also added new ranks of user group and rewards to keep members active in the forum

Wow that's great ! Thx, it's very inspiring because I'm in the same niche and it makes me want to continue creating youtube videos

 

[neelayza]

Started mines about 2 years ago, currently at 1600 members plus, some signed up orgenically, while I used Micro tasks sites like TimeBucks and SproutGigs to get some on board.
Overall it's been an amazing experience, and I'm focused on spreading the word and growing my forum. Nothing good comes easy, but I'm sure not quitting

Sorry I'm not english native speaker and I think there is no equivalent in my country, I'm having a little trouble understanding the concept. If I understand correctly SproutGigs is a bit like Fiverr?

And for Timebucks, is it a service used to pay people to post on your forum?