one good way you can do to make your forum more popular that ive even tried for myself for my website is if you have a myspace you can put the URL of your forum site as your name on myspace so that way everytime some sees your pic on myspace itll have the name of your site above it so youll be seen by someone all the time...and someone will always be bound to be curious about what your website is about becuase they may know you and wonder what youve been doing.

Here are my ideas based on my total inexperience on the subject

1. Make your forum rules real simple. If your forum becomes popular, then is the time to add more rules if you need to.
2. Change the color scheme from the standard default so your site has a unique look, you did not give the address of your website so perhaps you have done this already.
3. Don't have too many forums and subforums to start with.
4. The most popular forums seem to be the ones that deal with a topic that covers a subject/hobby that is maybe a little out of the ordinary - like photography or wind surfing. In fact, the more out of the ordinary, the more popular the forum seems to be. I would think it is much better to choose one subject and have several forum categories that deal with different aspects so that the chosen subject can be covered in some depth, rather than having a whole range of differing subjects that are there in the hopes of catching someone's attention.

To give a couple of examples of suggestion 4.
Here in the UK we have an expression "trainspotter" to describe someone whose hobby it is to stand on railway platforms taking down the serial numbers of passing locomotives in a little notebook. Now, to most people, this sounds like an utterly boring passtime, if not a little odd. But to the true trainspotter it is most interesting. (I just quickly checked google and found 2 trainspotter forums each with more than 6,000 registered users, and about 20 forums with 100 or more users).
Another trainspotting type hobby (ie. one that most "ordinary" people do not understand) is World War 2 re-enactment, where groups of re-enactors take over a field and dress up in American, British and German army kit and spend the weekend re-enacting and socialising. Who would be interested in that? Not many, you would think.
Well it turns out that that the most popular forum in the UK which was started fairly recently is so popular that the site frequently can't last out the month and goes down because it has exceeded its bandwidth limit. (Its currently down.)
Of course I don't give these examples as proof of anything, just something to think about.

Well you have to post your forum's address in other forums to make it popular. Like I just did

-SenJen
senjenforum.com

lol,i'm trying this too

what i do is go on the other sites and post my

website name

with their permission of course

INDEED WITH THERE PERMISSION. lol i also run a forum or did untill my host shut down which is why im here but...

I find it hard to advertise or get more people to your forum anyway. I did go round forums and advertise but i never got good things from this only bad.

Most of the time there is 1,000's of forums being advertised there anyway so there isn't much chance people will look at yours as they have alot to choose from. The other problem i had was people registering on my forum and spamming or causing trouble from the forum that i advertised on. (most of them was without asking permission)

I entered my forum into lots of search engines and added it to advertising forums. One i got something out of was www.forumadvertiser.com you can also do post swaps with people on there. you do 20 on there forum and they do 20 on yours. I did this and people liked my forum so they stayed. Just needed that extra push to get them there.

Do you have a link to your forum so we can have alook please?

Also make sure there are plenty of boards to read and a few posts to keep people interested. Ive seen people advertising there forum before they have members, posts, and enough boards to keep people interested.

This post has been edited by ~Upnorf Cr3w~: Mar 10 2008, 10:23 PM

Get your site out there, but not by spamming it. For example, participating in other forums with your own forum in your signature for example, also keeping content fresh, keywords for search engines and the like. Also further to note, i've noticed that some forums use a portal, where the front page is mainly news, latest threads and the like.. or forum threads that "act" as a news header, followed by "replies" in the threads, cleverly disguised as "read comments".

You can post your site in your signature, post them on other websites. or just spread by mouth. But if you post on another person website, they might not like that so if there is an advertisement section i would post your website there and describe it.

This post has been edited by goldtupac: Mar 15 2008, 09:40 AM

There are few steps to make your forum popular.

1.First of all you need some active members and staff for your forum
2. make good Categories and topics to discuss.
3.Try to keep the spammers away from you forum cause oftenly they cause bad impression for your forum
4.make the design simple and attractive. (don't make over it extra)
5.If you can try to the link exchange to get new users.
6.Don't forget things never become popular in days or in moments. it take times and need works

i guess there are few steps that can make your form popular.

What about paid postings
How Do I Make My Forum More Popular?

I know of a couple of forums that are doing pretty good.

They use paid posters and I was also told that the more links you provide in a thread, the more search engine friendly the forum becomes.

Has anybody used these tactics?

-reply by Just_me