Perhaps one of the most difficult parts of running a website is getting people to come. After all, you aren’t going to waste your time and possibly money on a site that nobody likes, are you?
Step One: Make Sure You Have Quality Content
Before you go out prancing around and telling how great your site is, you need to have good, quality content. DON’T begin adveritising your site before it is ready. Trust me, I have learned that the hard way over and over again. No “Under Construction” signs should be on a site that you are promoting.
You may also consider investing a little time and bandwidth into an arcade that integrates into your forums. A popular arcade for Invision Power Board is IBProArcade. A good example of an arcade is the KrazyLetter Arcade. There are literally hundreds of games availible for IPB Arcade, and it offers a good content boost.
If your site focuses on buisiness, news, current events, or other rapidly changing topics, you should get an RSS reader for your website and use it to syndicate popular news sources (Yahoo is a good one). IPB 2.x has a module for this on Invisionize.
Step Two: Promoting Your Site
Now comes the hard part. To begin promoting your site, start small. Try promoting your site in your neighborhood and at school. Tell your buddies at work (if you are old enough to have a job), they might just tell their friends. Word of mouth is the fastest way to spread a site. Get backlinks to your site, get ranked in search engines.
When your site has been going for awhile, consider investing in ads from Google AdWords. You only pay a few cents per click for a text ad, and your ad is displayed on thousands of sites. Another company to consider adveritising through is Adbrite.
Step Three: Keep Plugging Away
The key to any site is return visitors. For a community-based site, return visitors are a priceless and necessary thing to continue operating. As a result, you must continually update and revise your content, manage and participate in your forums, add new features and attractions, and continue adveritising.
Building and promoting a successful website is not an easy task. But, with perserverence, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
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Good, quality content also means that it has useful information that people would like to read. If you are starting a forum, perhaps create a bunch of posts, and maybe even pretend to have new users, by creating new user accounts and chatting with yourself.
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