Your Founding Members

When we start a forum, we can't go full-force with advertising, because you'll be promoting an essentially empty community, and it will be ineffective.

So where do you get your first group of members from? Personal friends? Private invites?

 

Well, I usually just ask some good friends to join. Then that will get the forum a good kick start

 

Private invites, and usually the beta testers are the first to join and such.

 

I'm guessing most of mine came from the org. It was the only place at the time I posted my graphics on.

 

Generally, I tend to privately invite a select group of people.

 

This is what I did.

But at some point they want to tell there friends which I said 'ok' after the core group joined. I wanted the first people to join to set the tone of the forum.

 

Personal friends.

 

I usually start on vBcom/org in addition to inviting people. When I'm ready I can start the advertising on specific niche sites related to my forum.

 

Mostly post exchanges and making several accounts.

 

inviting a few friends to come in and post a few threads, get discussions going, and then ask them to invite a few friends and then once we have about 5 threads in every section, with a few replies in each, then we can start advertising

 

I managed to form a close community on a bigboard and they moved along with me, when I began my site

 

Personal friends and people that just so happened to stumble upon our community.

 

MSN contacts.

 

Mostly people I have some acquaintance with, either friends or pure associates.