My forum has always been slow but it seems to be getting better.. I’m hoping a Post Bomb for the month of June (With the winner winning money) will perk it up for now.

But the future is blank..

Smiley – Some great advice there. Thanks for sharing your experience; it’s truly inspirational.

Jon – You are more than welcome, Jon. I am glad you are enjoying the blog

What I have witnessed with new sites is, when they are launched they do get a sudden influx of new users. Friends, acquaintances of friends, regulars from other sites — they all come and sign up, join in, suck up, hoping to get staff status, come to be nosey, check out the site etc — this lasts, in my experience, for around 3 months.

Around the 3 month mark, the site dies down and goes quiet and you’re left with only 3 or 4 regular users as the site’s novelty ‘newness’ has worn off and everyone goes back to their usual digs.

This is the point where most people shut their site down, or leave it to crash and burn on its own. They think “oh, the site’s died. Give up” – I went through this site myself. I suddenly went from 15 regular chatters simultaneously to.. 4! But I kept at it, I kept my very few members happy, kept encouraging them, kept getting them involved.. and eventually we started getting found through Yahoo and Google.. so we got genuine new users — which is what you want, really.

Around the 8 month mark is where you’ll see proper progress. It’s a long wait, but a worthwhile one. All my current regulars are genuine newbies that have found me through search engines. All the original ‘regulars’ I used to have when I first started came from other sites, either from Chatagogo or Just Chat they came from.. they’ve gone back to their original digs and I now have my own regulars, with its own atmosphere, its own banter, its own feeling.

…Because I simply kept it chugging along after that initial, inevitable ‘dip’ that all communities will suffer after a few months.

If your planning on running a forum you need to have the motivation to keep at it. That’s why so many people fail, because they expect it to build itself.

The biggest one that sticks out to me is #4. When I go to a forum and see no new threads, or very few, I just don’t hang around. I’m sure that most people do the same. Having new threads every day/ hour/ minute is just huge, and it really can’t be understated.

#2 is crucial as well. It also makes me wonder when I join a forum and introduce myself, and no one greets me. That’s not a good thing at all. A good community goes out of its way to greet new people, just like in real life.

AA++!! Great post. I will certainly keep these points in mind in my new adventures (trying to create a community as we speak). Thanks.