Forum promotion

[aj8]

One day, a random person found my (at that time empty) http://www.4sme.co.uk/forum/ 4sme Forums, and posted a message about a b2b scam he had been the victim of. I replied. He re-replied. Someone else found it thru google, and posted. Then someone else. Then a couple of others. Then the topic deviated to another similar scam.. And so on.

At present I have about 17 or so members who have all independently found the site thru google, most of which have posted once or more.

This seems (mildly) impressive to me, since I've really not put any work into promoting the forum at all. It also proves interest/demand for something like this [a central forum to discuss and compare notes on scam companies in the uk].

How do people think I could go about increasing the growth rate, and encouraging users who signed up to talk about scams to look at / start other threads on general business topics? I don't want the site to be all about scams...

[Chris]

Is your forum fully SE friendly? Meaning no session IDs?

[aj8]

think so : googling for "site:www.4sme.co.uk" does give a lot of pages on the forum that have been indexed.... is that what you meant? or have i missed the point? I am running MyBB http://www.mybboard.com/...

[dondor]

just keep using the forums to report scam, google will index and you will get your complainers

[aj8]

) )

A.

[MarkB]

If you get threads reporting scams, which are worth plenty of people finding out about, then submit it to Digg.com or something.

And for your other topics, maybe find other complimentary sites (particularly blogs) and see if they'd be interested in linking to you.