Once you’ve launched forum, invite people to join it not only through your site news section but through your newsletter as well. Make some posts with forums of which you are a member already. Maybe some of your acquaintances will join your forum and will share thankless work of promoting it and making it popular.

Ask your friends for support. Let them post announcements about launch of your forum on their sites. Later on they may be interested in linking to your forum or to some posts within your forum.

Try to be a strong and charismatic leader. You are a person who is supposed to unite people. Make several new posts every day but never post for posting sake only. Your posts should be interesting and up to date. Your answers should be polite, useful and informative… though I suspect that you will learn all this by time your forum will have been launched.

Distinguish community groups. With any forum there are usually several types of members. Some are more active than others, are probably shy or do not feel inspired enough to make some posts. This is problem that, as admin of forum, you should visualize every member of community and stimulate every person to be more active if your aim is to make a live forum on your site, not to display its existence only.

The simplest way to involve maximum number of members in some sort of discussion is to start a poll on your forum on some actual and communication inspiring topic. Let every member share his opinion. To make poll noticeable put some sort of an announcement on index page of site. You may include some poll results in announcement to make it more provoking.

Well, these are basic things you should do to make forum breathe. Yet breathing does not mean living – it’s just first sign of it. Don’t fool yourself with this sign and don’t think that forum is ready to escape from your trusteeship.

At this time forum will become rather big and will take more of your time to moderate it. This is best moment to encourage forum most active members offering them to do moderator work with some sections of your forum. Unload yourself and stimulate other, though you should be very careful with moderator offer. The work does not require some special feature but a person offered should be reliable, polite, and a specialist in field. Do not make a mistake with new moderators as such a mistake may spoil all your efforts on vivifying forum.

Mistakes

Do not start with lots of topics. It’s better to start with field you feel sure about only. A little bit later when experts from other fields join your forum, you will add some other threads. But do not hurry with it so as not to leave some posts unanswered. That is worst thing that can happen to a forum.

Do not create several accounts of your own trying to create illusion that community already exists. Your pen will be detected sooner or later and this may cause a total crash of all your efforts. Behave yourself gingerly with other forums; do not promote yours in an open manner. Such posts will probably be deleted and you will get nothing but a spoiled reputation.

Try to use hint promotion; while answering some questions make some links to your site and to some posts on your forum. In case posts on your forum are of some real help to your posts on other forums, they will probably not be deleted and you will manage to attract some new members.

Conclusion

It’s of no use to argue that a working and living forum is of great value to any site; though before starting you should be aware that it will take lots of your time and efforts to make it popular and living with its own life. Ready to try it? Go for it! And good luck to you.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing.

There are major benefits of having an affiliate marketing program. Advantages include:

- Pay Only When Affiliate Traffic Generates A Sale. Pay-For-Performance marketing is becoming norm on Internet. This is a lot different from a newspaper ad or direct mail. With traditional advertising you pay most of your marketing costs up-front whether advertisement does well or not. With affiliate marketing, you pay most of your costs only when a sale is made.

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