How To Advertise Your ProBoard

[danielrpg]

How do you do banners and buttons?

[gray929]

For Youtube, I wouldn't recommend a video giving an overview of your site in the form of a slideshow. I bet you will receive a lot more guests by adding your sites URL to a video using a free movie maker program. You should film a video (or download a video which is free to use. You an find these through Google) of something related to your niche so you know people watching your video will already be interested in what your site has to offer. Then, just tack on your url to the bottom corner of the video. I have been doing that with one of my websites and its been going better than expected. YT is one of the best new ways of advertising not known to many.

[Nintendo Master]

I made a video on youtube but no-one has joined

[jaws50005]

The thing about advertising I have found out, is that it takes time. You won't gain bunches of members in a day after you advertise. If you don't see any new members, don't get discouraged, just keep on advertising.

What I do to advertise is post a usually bi-monthly update of what is going on at my site. Contests, new features, member of the month is what usually goes in these updates. I put a banner at the top of the update, and a text link right below it. Then at the end of the update, I put my site's staff member's name and position, followed by another link.

I also find top lists that are some what related to my site. I join that toplist and post my site on there, then other people will rate the site.

It's always been said, word of mouth is the best kind of advertisement. Do you have anyone you talk to that likes the topic of your forum? Then give them a link to it. You don' t have to say it's yours, just say that that is a cool forum.

-Jaws

[Nintendo Master]

I am very lucky. Now, I have 39 members and my forum is only 5 days, 2 months old.

[Rain]

Dec 5, 2008 20:35:05 GMT -8 jaws50005 said:

The thing about advertising I have found out, is that it takes time. You won't gain bunches of members in a day after you advertise. If you don't see any new members, don't get discouraged, just keep on advertising.

What I do to advertise is post a usually bi-monthly update of what is going on at my site. Contests, new features, member of the month is what usually goes in these updates. I put a banner at the top of the update, and a text link right below it. Then at the end of the update, I put my site's staff member's name and position, followed by another link.

I also find top lists that are some what related to my site. I join that toplist and post my site on there, then other people will rate the site.

It's always been said, word of mouth is the best kind of advertisement. Do you have anyone you talk to that likes the topic of your forum? Then give them a link to it. You don' t have to say it's yours, just say that that is a cool forum.

-Jaws

Yeah, I certainly agree with this. Our forum as been open a little over 4 years now and we've really seen how forums goes through stages of activity and joining. Some months you will get one or many no one to join, the next you might get 10; it's very unpredictable, but there is one thing that you can know for sure. If you don't actively and continuously try to get members, you won't get them.

[-Xavier-]

Yeah, I've had my forum for months now, and through those months, I've gotten only 2 members. 4 really, but the other 2 never come on.
But I'm really starting to just advertise my site and I've gotten 2 more.

[tank565]

Also I found out its not the number of members but the number of members who post more then once a week or at all. I have 9 members on my new board and only two of us really post on there.

[Rozic Dixon]

Gonna need to afialate some more.

[Kallison]

My forum is about 11 months old right now, and one thing I've noticed is that if you don't keep a steady stream of advertising, you'll LOSE more members than you'll gain. I at one point had 70+ members, and I didn't advertise the site for a while. They slowly trickled off, and now I'm down to about 35. But now that I've started affiliating with like sites - affiliates work best if you're joining together with sites with similar topics rather than random sites - we've gotten a couple new members. Keeping a steady ad on the board here as well as joining some roleplay directories and listing your site there are also good ways to get your forum some attention.

[Lieutenant Rey]

Free web promotion.com is a jewelry site it doesnt work

[Imprintation]

I Think when it comes to advertising you have to make sure that the site you advertise on is active otherwise your just advertising on a dead site and that way your not going to get many members My site has been open for 3 days now and we already have 6 memebers so im proud of it.

[Michael]

Dec 18, 2008 18:35:27 GMT -8 Lieutenant Rey said:

Free web promotion.com is a jewelry site it doesnt work

Dec 18, 2008 21:00:40 GMT -8 Imprintation said:

I Think when it comes to advertising you have to make sure that the site you advertise on is active otherwise your just advertising on a dead site and that way your not going to get many members My site has been open for 3 days now and we already have 6 memebers so im proud of it.

From the Discussion Rules:

Your posts should be at least 4 sentences long. Anything less shows that not enough thought was taken in the post, and is most likely not productive towards the conversation.

Please make sure you develop your thoughts/points more in the future.
--

Dec 18, 2008 18:35:27 GMT -8 Lieutenant Rey said:

Free web promotion.com is a jewelry site it doesnt work

Links aren't needed. Your post adds nothing.

[sykofangurl]

There were a lot of things said here that made sense, and a lot of them I have tried and it simply seemed to not work.

The most important thing I read was that asking people to join seems desperate. I never thought about that, but you are completely right. It will take some deep thinking about ways to make people think that they are missing something by not being at our site/forum. Of course, I personally think that is the case, but they won't know it unless I do something that makes them think so.

As for topsites, I have our main site listed with many topsites and it just isn't working. We have a few links in each day but not enough to make a difference. Our site gets overshadowed by banners from other topsites, or sites that have adult content (even though the topsite "swears" they don't participate by adding those kind of links).

I also have a myspace and facebook and use it as a kind of "guess what we have going on" kind of advertising. but there have been times when I have flat out bannered a request for new members. After reading about sounding desperate I am kind of embarrassed I did that, even though I didn't intend for it to sound that way.

We don't have a ton of members after a little over a year of having the forum, but if I could just keep more people active...that's my main goal now.

[Jeopardy]

To me, people think of advertising the wrong way. I hear people who do all these join for joins, or that kind of crap. In my opinion, I would rather have 50 active members who joined of their own free-will and actually wanted to be on the forum, rather then have 50 members who joined because I joined their site. Join for joins never work in my head.

Then there is the fact that so many people make guests register to advertise, or have a certain number of posts before someone can advertise. Seriously? To me, having guests advertise freely is a great thing because then I have almost an unlimited sites I can advertise on due to the "your advertise board must be guest friendly" and the fact that these sites are giving you the ability to get a whole new database of sites to advertise on! *shrugs* I just don't like it when people complain that guests are advertising on your board.