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nitr021 submitted a new Article:
Surviving just after going live
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Surviving just after going live
As part of the whole forum management guide/ponders I have written this small article of what you should try doing to get your site out there and surviving after you have found that niche market. This guide follows a guide on target market, you might want to read that first.
After you have found a stable and good market segment you might see other sites trying to steal that niche that you first found. They will try to improve your ideas and add a little extra just to get new users and this will certainly drive you crazy. First thing first, you will have to stop any links to your competition on your board, as they will try to infiltrate and pm users asking them to go to their website or put a link in their signatures. If they still persist make rules forcing them to have a link back and the link should be displayed everywhere on their site, this sometimes gets them frustrated and you will gain more out of it.
Surviving that first 1-2 years is pretty harsh, you will have to constantly introduce new features to the site and keeping it active with full of events. This small tip gives the users a feel that the site is very alive and dedicated to that niche market. Most of the time you can’t be always lucky to have dedicated users who will advertise for you, this means you have to seek for more users on your own. The first thing you will do is to put links everywhere that you can for free, even if the forum you are advertising on isn’t related to yours, this will still grab some users attention, but be careful where you post, sometimes it can bring spam users to. Another way to get new users and to keep old ones dedicated is to make a newsletter, in the newsletter you should add or release something new on the site so that they are interested in coming back each time you email them. Now to spice the newsletter up you have to have some sort of competition of some sort where you list only 2-3 users from the board as being the best, and there you could advertise there blogs or site (not the competition though). (Well you have to figure out on your own on how to do that). To grab more unregistered user you might want to add a signup to newsletter text field where users can just input their email address and you can include them in the email.
Sometimes it may feel that you can’t do it on your own, and you are right, you need good friends who are willing to help you make new features or...
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