10 Step Guide to Growing your forum

I've put together a 10 Step Guide for starting and growing a forum and I'm looking for feedback.

Q1. Are their any steps that look the most helpful?
Q2. Anything you disagree with?
Q3. Anything that you don't understand?
Q4. Anything you think I should add?

After I touch it up some more, I will post it to AA and some other sites so that other admins can benefit. Please comment on the AA forum you think I should post the full guide in.

Here's the full guide: http://howto.lefora.com/wiki/help-guides-forum/guide-to-growing-your-forum

Summary:
1 Set a clear Forum Name & Description
2 Post a new topic at least once a day
3 Make your forums publicly viewable
4 Customize your forum's theme with images and colors
5 Invite your Friends
6 Use 'Social Media' and link to your forum or topics
7 Email all members regularly
8 Link to important topics from your forum's sidebar
9 Cross promote with other forums
10 Have Fun & Enjoy yourself

Read the full guide.

 

Very decent guide. Simple, straight forward, good thoughts, and overall an entertaining read!

 

11. Recruit, recruit, recruit...

 

I agree with most of these however don't really agree with the e-mail members regulary some people don't really like that and it encourages them not to come back!

 

very good, i like it

 

Thanks everybody, and 2dub, you're right, nothing works as best as getting your hands dirty and going out there and recruiting people in.

merk_aus, good point. Our our forum software, we allow members to opt out of specific types of emails, such as notifications from the admins. Do you think this affords people to make a decision before leaving a forum? Our system is a one click unsubscribe and doesn't require you to login.

 

And of course, keep spam off the forum

 

We do that automatically on our software with spam filters that learn over time, sorta like your spam filter in gmail.

Do you guys find that to be a large problem on your forums? Is anybody using any spam filter plugins that they really like?

 

I use No Spam from vb.org and havent had a problem since.

 

I actually made my post because it looked like someone may have been spamming this forum, but could not be sure. They had made a post just before my post.

Anywho - depends on your definition of spam? Things not of interest to the general forum members (viagra on vb.com) is spam.

But also things of interest to the forum members may be considered spam if it is in the incorrect place on the forum, or they are not paying advertising, such as a hosting company putting up posts on webhostingtalk.com.

We don't have a large problem, but do need to keep vigilante.