How long did the '100 members' milestone take you?

[Demosthenes]

My latest board has been open for 2 months today and we're currently at 89 members... considering sign up rates in the last 5 days I predict we'll reach 100 in the next 7 days or so... So, how long did it take you? This is always a milestone I would imagine, for an admin - and I'd be interested to know how long it took you and what methods you used.

I have used no paid advertising at all, my main source of traffic has been via signature links on other forums and recently, via being featured on notable sites since we launched our main/content site.

(I'd be particularly interested to hear from larger forums)

 

[LeeD]

Congrats on the mark! I have not hit it yet with our new forum PerformancePark.com, but then again we have only been online for 2 weeks or so. We have 23 right now!

 

[Kall]

5 months to 100 members.
7 months to 200 members.
8 months to 10,000 posts.
10 months to 300 members.

Right now, about 11 months:
Threads: 2,135 (4 Today), Posts: 15,929 (30 Today), Thread Views: 183,503
Total Registrations: 338, Active Registrations: 313

 

[Joshuad]

It took me about 2 months to hit 100, then 4 months to hit 200...things have been slowing down as of late and I haven't had much time, but I'm almost at 6 months and I have almost 230.

 

[TheWebGuru]

Not many

 

[TheWebGuru]

hopefully my new forum does well

 

[Scribbller]

Well we got 50 members on the third day so we reached 100 members in just one month.

 

[Demosthenes]

Well we got 50 members on the third day so we reached 100 members in just one month.

Interesting, how did you achieve this?

 

[Nexopia]

The 100th account was created 4 days after it went live.

 

[Demosthenes]

The 100th account was created 4 days after it went live.

What methods of recruitment led to that?

 

[Nexopia]

I guess I cheated a bit, as it was my second site, and I had a bit of a beta type site before, though that was limited to 30 people or so. Those 30 people all joined the first day or two, and alot of people came over from my old site (which I coded and admined but didn't own). The other fact is that it is a very general site, so my target market is about 20% of the population, making it very easy to spread. That also explains why I now have 225,000 users after 22 months. I couldn't tell you how long it took to get 100 people on the first site though, as I really don't know. I don't have access to those stats anymore. I expect it took 2-3 weeks? Once again it is a very general site though. As far as I know, it was advertised mainly in chat room.

 

[Mok]

took me about 1 month to get 100 members.

my forum is pretty specific, golfers in toronto is the target market...

word of mouth was our advertising technique.

 

[Mephisteus]

On my clan forum it took about half a month to reach 100 members, this includes the 16 members we started out with. Although we got featured on the frontpage of www.americasarmy.com when we started out, that got us a few new members. After three and a half months we have these statistics
Threads: 713, Posts: 3,657, Members: 151

I also pruned about 80 members

 

[SaN-DeeP]

well we started with 150 members i guess..
we were running on proboards and then bought our own domain name was hosted with a friend and all members registered on new invision power forums from scratch..

 

[tony84]

im on 30 members in a month not reached the 100 mark but im hoping it will be in the next month or so,

also caiman, im from manchester aswel, thought id share that

 

[Stewart]

I'm about to hit the 100 mark - one user away from it - and it has taken me since around May to get where I am.

The forum is dedicated to history and started off as a phpBB forum which I linked to via a signature in almost all the forums I'm a member of. I changed in November to vBulletin and the growth has started to pick up - probably due to the superiority of the software and the regular updating of historical news that I provide in the News forum.

I don't rank too well on Google at the moment although my online reference, once online , will help to push me just under the top three or four (BBC and Wikipedia ) but I've linked to the other major history forums - and smaller ones - on the internet with reciprocal links and the communities tend to drift between them all creating a larger historical community.

While most of the earlier members don't post anymore - either because they were friends who signed up for the hell of it or due to the lack of activity in the early days - I'm going to try to woo some of them back with a nice festive Merry Christmas from Talk History email with some end of year news. Hopefully they'll see, if they pop back, that it's becoming active.

 

[Demosthenes]

Well done on sticking with your forum for this long, so far- I know how hard it cna be starting from the absolute bottom. I took a look at your site out of curiosity and it it looks great, from the content to the style, nice work... you just got your 100th member

 

[Stewart]

Cheers. I got a big grin on me now.

The style's ongoing. Need some time off work to continue replacing the default vBulletin graphics.

 

[carwash]

100 members took my site a month and four days.

 

[l234244]

I cheated a bit, spent £50 using google adwords to get started. Maybe worth a shot if you dont have and rankings yet.