How to Increase Traffic at an Online Community Forum

Make it look good. Ask your community for feedback on whether or they like the forum design. Implement the best of their ideas. People who frequent forums like a community aspect and an administrator who treats the community with value has more of a chance of having long-term subscribers.

Post! A forum administrator should be active in their community. Create new topics of discussion every day and respond to other users' questions. Your postings will increase your website's page rank in the search engines and can bring you more visitors.

Write a newsletter. Give users a chance to subscribe. Many subscription options are available in the administrator tools of a forum to generate a mailing list of your users. A newsletter can remind them to visit your forum more regularly.

Have contests! Nothing creates buzz as well as the opportunity to get something free. You can have a posting contest, a "Refer a Friend" contest and do all sorts of interesting things to generate interest, new subscriber and increase traffic and content on your forum.

Add tools with rich features and SEO (search engine optimisation) tools to your website. There are many tools that can help to generate meta tags or help you understand where your traffic comes from. There are free resources such as Forum Toolz that provide free downloadable software that can help you enhance your community forum. You can install hit counters, refer a friend buttons, bookmarklet devices and other fun add-ons that can dress up your forum, make it more interesting to visitors and bring in extra traffic.

Make users aware of the tools available such as e-mail notification when threads are updated or other features on the site so that people find all the bells and whistles that can enhance their experience while visiting the community.

Hire someone to help. If you want to increase and maintain traffic, your forum must be busy. Many people hire professional moderators to keep conversations going or paid posters to start new and interesting conversations so that visitors will stay once they arrive.

Do link or banner exchanges. By doing link exchanges with other forums or websites where you post one another's links or banners on one another's website, you can increase your traffic and your indexing in the search engines which can help increase your traffic substantially.