forum promotion advice needed

[ElectricianForums]

Okay

im at the final stages of finishing my electrical forum, and have started create topics and discussion to try not to put off new guests.

here it is: http://www.electricianforums.co.uk

how often do you post on your sites? im currently posting one or two a day.

how do you promote your sites to the general public? facebook page? Competitions? Other forums?

how do you secure your site from spammers? i currently use google's captcha?

 

[kjetterman]

I think it's always a good thing to have a Facebook page to help promote the forums. To build up my site, i'm starting at least 5 threads a day and answering others as well.

As for spammers-- what forum software are you using?

 

[bauss]

You should post on your forum as much as you can, one or two posts a day won't cut it for a new forum. You need to bring the community together, it's your job as the admin to interact with your members, and making them feel apart of the community.

If you need help attracting new members, then post exchanges are a good for a short term boost in activity on your forum, and it makes your forum look active to guests which encourages them to join.

I secure my forum from spammers with keyCaptcha. But I like Solvemedia better. I just haven't found a Solvemedia addon for IPB.

 

[Jack_Rouse]

Okay

im at the final stages of finishing my electrical forum, and have started create topics and discussion to try not to put off new guests.

here it is: http://www.electricianforums.co.uk

how often do you post on your sites? im currently posting one or two a day.

how do you promote your sites to the general public? facebook page? Competitions? Other forums?

how do you secure your site from spammers? i currently use google's captcha?

Pre-launch you need at least 1000 posts to make the forum look busy.

Sit promotion is all about hard work, it involves as much work off site as it does on site, you are not using one of the more common forum platforms, I have no idea what SEO tools are available to you as plugins.
In any case you need to register with Google, Bing and Yahoo, they are the big three.
For Spam blocking Question & Answer is good, but don't use a question that can be googled for the answer, because bots will and do google it !.

Don't use competitions until you have a big membership, they tend not to work in small forums.
Twitter is good promotion, build up a good collection of followers, they will have followers who just collect followers for fun, start off by following big names like Steven Fry, then as people find you, follow them back, it all helps.

 

[eldritch1969]

hi,
good to you if you can get these 1000 posts at start off, but it looks and is really unrealistic. It needs quite a few people to write as many posts.
Nice to see that you don't use the usual vB,Xenforo,IPB, SMF solutions, too. It gives a different feel to your forum, imho.
Now, why on earth did you choose clouds seen from a plane to be your forum banner ? Can't understand that. Choose a banner related to your main subject, which is electricity ! Why not a big thunderbolt, if you want to stay into the sky imagery ?
To attract members might not be so difficult, I see you have as many as I have have on my forum, but to make them post is another trick. I get 1500 messages with the same number of members.
You have to work out what could make them post more.

 

[ElectricianForums]

Thanks for the replies,

I am using kunea. A forum plugin for joomla.

The cloud banner is used to tie in with another website that is currently under construction. A site with electrical guides and videos etc.

I will create a twitter and Facebook page and promote through here soon too. Thanks for the suggestions