At what point did you feel you could stop advertising?

If you've gotten to the point where your forum is self-sustaining--that is, you no longer have to advertise because searches and referrals are bringing in enough new members and revenue--at what point did you feel it was "safe" to stop answering every post and trying to get new members?

 

I never started.

 

5,000 members and I'll back off on advertising.

 

I never stop advertising, my youtube video blogging has developed a life of its own.

 

To me, those are 2 separate subjects.

1. advertising on the web, I do not do, advertising off the web never stops.
2. making sure people get the information they seek will never stop, if not me answering then someone else is.

 

Youtube is one that I don't see ending any time soon. It's free, it works, and it's fun. I'm actually going to start working on a big one starting tomorrow. I got everything cleaned and loaded ready to go.

 

I stopped around last Christmas. I took a vacation and never really got interested in getting back into full-swing. At Christmas, the site was 10 months old and was (and still is) self-sustaining. 99% of our registrations/traffic comes from Google and as long as that doesn't change, I'm all set.

Recently though, I've been spending a lot of time on the forum. I feel like I owe it to my members to come back and interact on a daily basis like I used to.

 

I tend to just optimise the site and then let it be. You gain some good links to forums naturally, and you gain lots of traffic from your lots of members, and I find it'll just go on and on and on with most forums that do manage to take off okay.

I guess I'd be getting more traffic if I did advertise somewhere, but it'd also be a cost, and providing they're all increasing in traffic and don't stop I tend to not even think about it.

I'm not competing with many other forums though, and I guess some of you will be running forums far far bigger than all of mine put together, and if that was the case for me I'd have a decent advertising budget and I'd be constantly advertising.

 

And, it depends on what kind of advertising do you do? Are you paying for monthly ads, or are you using a long term advertising program such as social networking or video blogging?

If I did not post another video, youtube alone has 320 of my videos. They will continue to work for my site until they are taken down or I delete them. Then there is yahoo video, metacafe, break, dailymotion, veoh, vimeo,,,,, All of those sites are working to send my site traffic. And they will continue to do so until the videos are removed.

 

I've never gotten into this video blogging. Can it really generate lots of traffic to your sites then and not just to the video?

 

Here is a thread I posted about promoting your site. I made that video myself.

http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/pl...ities-promotion/beat-promotion-strategy-1495/

youtube is my #2 source of targeted traffic, an my #4 source of total traffic.

 

I kind of think you should never stop advertising your forum. For example, at least anime wise, when they first get into anime they go to youtube. If I made two or three videos and stopped advertising, people wouldn't think we are "reliable" because we haven't updated in months. I just think constant advertising is needed for a forum to grow constantly.

 

This can apply to anyone but do you make and wear clothing like shirts or hats with your site name / logo? I'm going to have some shirts made up here pretty soon along with some caps. I figured it couldn't hurt since we do a lot of traverling.