Starting forums

[newdeveloper]

For anyone out there who has started a forum, how long has it taken for your forum to actually pick up a few members and how did you promote it?

[Cutter]

The last forum I launched I think took off within 24 hours, so pretty much instantly. But thats because I already had the traffic for that niche.

If you are planning on creating SomeTopicForums.com and then sitting and waiting for people to come, good luck. You'll have a much better time creating a content site and then when you have a few hundred uniques a day, then launch the forum.

Forums are really tough. I've got a forum with thousands of members, its a year old, and it makes almost nothing relatively to my other income. I think its critical for long term sucess, but for the short term you should have other income producing web assets so you can pay other people to do the pain-in-the-*** work.

[Chris]

I've never started a forum from scratch with no traffic source to feed it, so I wouldn't recommend that approach either.

[Chris]

By the way, your signature is bad. You use the text "this site" to form your link instead of some keyword rich text.

See #5 here:

http://www.websitepublisher.net/blog/2006/11/23/top-5-worst-seo-mistakes/

[newdeveloper]

didn't read that about links, thanks

[Chris]

Still not good

your anchor text has 3 words in it "www" "chattennis" and "com"

Neither of which you're optimizing for.

What you want is

"Chat Tennis" or "Chat Tennis Forums" or something like that.

[newdeveloper]

oh ok thx

[lionhart321]

Still not good

your anchor text has 3 words in it "www" "chattennis" and "com"

Neither of which you're optimizing for.

What you want is

"Chat Tennis" or "Chat Tennis Forums" or something like that.
Are you saying it is not a good idea to put the domain name in the anchor text? Between these two options, which is preferable?

Historum.com - History Discussion Forums (http://www.historum.com)

History Discussion Forums (http://www.historum.com)

[chrisranjana.com]

I would say pure keywords in links are more preferred for SEO.