If you have not already make sure to read Forum Marketing Part 1 to learn how to set up for your forum for these simple methods.

Once you have your forum software and skin set up you’re ready to start attracting a community. The most important thing from here on out is that you realize your budget and what you want from your forum. In this post the marketing methods will be shown for ‘the little guy’ and ‘the big guy’. The goal for the little guy is to recover all costs over a year in advertising revenue while ‘the big buy’ will get to spend money more freely as his goal is to drive network traffic as well as establish a long-term forum.

The Little Guy

Start off by realizing that you don’t have $50,000 to spend on your site to become number one on Google at all costs, from there on out we can look at simple methods that cost no cash, just a little bit of time for each one.

Use your friends: This method is actually very simple; make your real life or online friends join the forum and let them make at least a few posts. This is obviously easier or harder to do depending on your forum topic and friends. You should be able to get at least 5-10 of your friends to register and make at least a post or two. Getting your first 10 members otherwise can be impossible without paying for it.

Cheap contest: Give away something every week or month that costs very little at most. For example give away a cheap flashlight, a small camera tripod, or a red laser pointer. If you give away even a simple prize there will be users who compete at some level to win it. As your forum gets larger you can move from $0.50 prizes up to prizes worth a few dollars. With this you can keep members interested and have posting contests or referral contests.

Static Sites: This method isn’t actually about a static site, but having a ‘normal’ site which can you can promote in order to get traffic. For example search engines love both blogs and review sites which get constant updates, if you can write content twice a week constantly then you can easily get search engines to send you thousands of visitors to your ‘normal site’ section where you can then promote your forum. This also gives forum members something to do while the forum grows and provides a reason for your forum to be viewed as superior to alternatives.

Web Directories: Submitting your site to free directories can provide you with hundreds of free links (some with PR) as well as a small amount of free traffic. For a good list with a lot of free web directories click here. Each site you submit to and are accepted in will provide one or two free links. At the same time many sites view the site before accepting it, which means an editor or administer of each will view your site. In addition you’ll often get one or two visitors a month from each directory who are bowering threw or apply themselves. These may not seem like much, but if you enter 100 directories then you may be getting 100 unique visitors every month who may become repeat visitors. It may not be huge, but over time it can build up. Make sure you apply only to those that do not require a return link.

Bonus method - Giving away power: When you have a small forum you generally will find yourself short on staff. If you do find this problem as your forum grows then you can use this to your advantage by giving away moderator positions (giving away admin powers is extremely dangerous!). If you give an active user a moderator position, the user will feel appreciated and will stay active and alert!

The Big Guy

Unlike the little guy money isn’t so hard. By spending a little extra you can save yourself hours on end; best of all you don’t really lose out on most methods because you can just alter them to accommodate your bigger budget.

If you have the money you also probably already have other sites which will make certain aspects such as improving backlinks, your PageRank and establishing a user base easier.

Adwords/YPN/Advertising: Arguably this is the easiest method out there. You give some company your credit card number and whatever you want your URL/title/description to be and they put it on thousands of sites. CPC networks will assure that you get what you pay for while CPM networks provide a grab bag of visitors dependent on your luck. The most important thing here is to make sure that you can earn this money back. Set your first $250 and watch what you get for that and how much you can earn off these visitors. Unless you find that its profitable there is no reason to spend another $3500 more and find yourself well in the red for the lifetime of the site.

One-up the Small guy: Don’t forget that as a big guy you can do almost everything the small guy can, but with more strength every time. You can pay companies to submit your site to directories for you getting the same effect with almost no time input. You can leverage any other sites you already have to provide base traffic or promote a “Static Site” thus indirectly promoting your forum as well. And finally don’t forget contests. With your larger budget you can host contests with prizes ranging from $100 to over $1000 attacking a huge amount of members.

Remember that these prizes will attract people desperate to win and thus make winning harder. Members will be more likely to spam the forum in a posting contest or ask their friends to join for money in order to win. At the end if you’re not careful everyone will disappear and you’ll just be out of some money. Make sure to organize the contest carefully and in such a way that you get as many unique visitors as possible to see and join the site.

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