You need to "seed" the forum and groups. If you're network is focused on a type of user group go to them. Sign them up. Show them how it works and could benefit them. Start some groups, get your friends and co-workers to post, etc.

SN sites take time. They need to grow organically to be considered sincere. Walking that line early is a careful balance.

There are actually some companies that will "create a community" for you... You pay them for how many posts/how many users you want and they will start posting on your website to get it going. Seems like a really strange business to be in, but I can see how it has some value, and that might be what you need in this case.

Anyone remember the URLs for those sites?

a forum posting contest with cash rewards can help get stuff populated

Jason, I will be testing this idea next weekend... we are soft launching at a trade show...

Posted By Jason Peterson on 12 Nov 2009 03:58 PM
a forum posting contest with cash rewards can help get stuff populated

This is where the point system come in to play!!!

true you could use points, we currently run contests but there is a bit of overhead.  People will post one liners if it goes by points so we have to have someone manually grade the contest, so we have some queries written to return both counts and all applicable posts, then between the counts by user and the actual quality of posts we derive winners, we have cut it down to only 3 winners per week to reduce the workload.

To be honest, this is a decent way to get things started and can get some forum participation started but has it's drawbacks, the regulars can be less tolerant of newcomers etc.

We are working on a new release and once we feel the functionality of the forums and community is competitive with the best in our industry we will probably stop the contests, or change the way they are done.

So I thought I would discuss my progress so far...

We officially launched on the 20th of last month (almost 30 days ago). At that moment we had a few friends that had signed up and had just listed our site on google, Bing, yahoo.

We now have approximately 50 members on the site and are beginning to build some small bit of momentum.

We got fairly quick google indexing through some strategic link placements with pertinent directories. We need to do more of that. We haev sent a few direct email invitations to organizations and clubs with mixed results.

Most of our traffic has come from Adwords and I feel we should plan to continue that as a status quo until I can focus more time on SEO and ad tweaking.

Typically we have about 1 new signup per day and are really enjoying the experience of it so far. Our conversion rate for our ads currently is about 1-2% and the abandon rate is about 50%. We are spending approximately $20 day in ads.

I have just setup a facebook page and an ad as an experiment, but am not really expecting much from that based on past experiences doing this for other service businesses.

Also, we have created a contest where we are gvining away a visa gift card jan 4th. To be eleigible, you have to sign up and (to sort of break the ice) post a "my favorite hobby is..." post in our forums. This has been a real help to building a set of conversations between site members but I personally don't think it has done that much for signups so far. IE, I think people that did this would have signed up anyway.

Anyway, just thought I would be all "Open Kimono" so anyone following behind me know what things might be like for them.

How did you go about doing the advertising? I'm hoping to launch one of my main websites (officially) by the end of 2009.

Well, I have done a little google advertising in the past. Basically sign up for adwords and they walk you through it... www.adwords.com or adwords.google.com.

You can really blow some money here if you are not careful, but keeping a budget and setting the ad to auto adjust the bid seems to help get the best blend of exposure vs expense so far...

Our launch day was at the Atlanta train show where we had abooth. this was really just to show people and guage interest. it was a tough crowd (lot of "non-internet" types there) but we did get really positive feedback from those that sort of get what we are trying to do. That weekend I ran a special ad focused on us and our very local region. I spent more than I normally would just to make sure we were seen by the people googling the train show.

I think those strategies pay off. Visibility and the chance to talk to someone in person is worth the spend as it spiderwebs into other connections quickly.

But normally we just run 3-4 ads focused on three topics (we cover several hobbies) at around $5 each and each one specifically talks about what the site is and what you can/should do there. We don't want to pay for clicks from people that misunderstand what we are all about.

Hmmmmmm, I'll check into the adwords pricing and see what it looks like. My target audience people from the local area so maybe a different approach is in order.

We have had widely varied success with adwords based on how much work we put in...a little effort went a long way.  General text based ads within search results and elsewhere were mediocre to poor.  Some large flash banners combined with targeting specific sites our research showed might produce has worked great.