Playing With Profits

There are some good old post that offers great ideas on how to launch a forum.

Ahmed Bilal offers some tips with this post How to launch a forum on your blog
# I hope you have friends as bloggers in your niche - leverage relationships to help give exposure to your forum through other blogs (note, you might want to offer an incentive - an offer for their readers, perhaps). It pays to make friends though.

# Create linkbait in advance and publish them on the day the forum launches - then use the resulting attention and traffic and funnel it to the forum. It’s cheap, and requires some effort, but matched with your existing blogging community this tactic alone can give your forum the initial push it needs to survive.

# Pre-populate the forum with some posts and threads so that it’s not totally empty. One tactic is to email regular readers and co-bloggers and get them to ’start’ on the forum a day or two before the actual launch. Real posts are always better than you creating 10 different IDs and posting under them.

# Building up interest in the forum in advance is a no-brainer, but instead of putting up announcements about it run a competition and give out a prize, make the competition winnable only through the forum and then promote that prize / competition everywhere. It’s been done before, but it works.

# Got some spare cash? Pay a popular blog to cover your forum - find a proper angle to suit that blogger’s audience if necessary.

Yaro Starak offers his advice on How To Launch A Forum With An Instant Audience
“Here’s a strategy for launching a buzzing forum from day one - create an uber-popular blog first, then launch a forum and bring your existing blog audience over to it.

Steve Pavlina has done just that launching his brand new Personal Development for Smart People Forums. He’s already reported explosive traffic growth at the forums and as I type this there are over 270 people on the forum with registrations numbers over 1000 and I expect the growth won’t be stopping any time soon.”

Other good launch idea are to offer discounts and prizes for those who post the most during a certain time. Rewards often attracts attention and creates buzz. I have seen forums offering some cash gift for people with highest posts every week and they do work well. It works very well and really does get the posting going.