Have you ever found yourself staring at your registration numbers, wondering if they’re growing fast enough? It’s easy to feel stuck or unsure about how to attract new members.

 

• What methods have worked for you to boost sign-ups?
  
• Are you trying ads, social media, partnerships, or something else?
  
• Do you think your forum is welcoming enough to newcomers?
  

My forum (a photography forum) has been online for 15 days now. I had a small influx of some old pals who started creating tons of threads and posts, making the place lively. And suddenly it has kinda come to a halt. A few are still posting, trying to keep the place active. I do my best, working all day, but it's hard and not good if all New Posts show is a list with just my name. I have all of 46 members now. The stats show between 30 to 34 are active every day. Well, maybe they visit but they aren't very active as in posting content. Not these last few days.

 

I was never on social media but have opened accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Bluesky. The trouble is that what I see on social media is people with thousands of followers and images that are liked thousands of times. Why would these people ever go join a new forum with just a handful of members where they will get maybe 5 or 6 Likes, if that?

 

I'm adding content, like articles on photography, and how-to's in Resources and the robots are crawling and indexing but it will take time before we start showing up in search results. Although they do know us as typing in my forum name we're on page 1 of Google (all the way down, but on page 1 nevertheless) and #1 en #2 on DuckDuckGo. We're nowhere yet when I search for "photography forums" though. I have added "photography forum" in the meta-description. Not sure it will help but worth to try.

 

In any case, I'm struggling with the question of where to find new members.

It’s true that we’re so much into being used and also want as much as likes as possible. Forums don’t give us that,

Have to say in that people are extremely hesitant in trying something that isn't Facebook, Bluesky or whatever. Been working on trying to get a certain type of audience that my forum caters too but, there's no movement on it. I kind of resided in that my feed within the forum is going to see topics made by me all the way down. Only broken up on the occasion I put in a posting package somewhere and that only last a few days at most.

 

I know trying to use Facebook isn't going to help as they are adamant in keeping people within the Facebook walls and, any links going outside of that are all but useless. I just continue on doing what I can and hopefully one day in the future things turn around.

I dont want to compare myself to any socially engineered media website. And by engineered I mean even the bots know your profile and preferences.

 

Now i am barely 2 months old so I can in no way have any complaint or concern of my registration rate. I just hope to provide an environment that is cleaner, easier, and better moderated than the top social sites. But it is hard to top the emotional impact 1000 likes on twitterx or facebook may give the average poster. They have all the psychology figured out. So my regs will likely come from more organic sources and likely from a peoples that has tired of the social media malarkey that goes on any more. (I love using that word lol)

Not at all, with 30 - 40+ registrations a month I wonder how that many people do find out about my board. I have managed to promote it to a great extent and I'm sure there's a lot of word of mouth for one of the few standalone resource boards on the Jcink platform.

Registrations, no. It's actually easy for me to get sign ups in my niche, but members that regularly contribute posts is more difficult.

No, not at all. I’m currently gaining about 40–90 new members each month, sometimes even more.

 

However, I dedicate a significant amount of time to actively promoting on various social media platforms, which greatly helps with visibility and traction.

 

It’s much harder to drive registrations, but putting in the effort and time is essential if you want to grow your community and continue attracting new members, particularly active contributors.

 

This also contributes to your SEO efforts. The more visible your forum becomes, the more likely you are to be recognized as an authority in your niche.

 

Engaging with your audience on social media and guiding them toward your forum is crucial. It’s not easy, but it’s necessary if we want to bring users back to forums.

 

If you’re not a fan of social media, growing your forum solely through SEO will be quite challenging. You can’t rely entirely on one strategy—it’s important not to put all your eggs in one basket.

 

These days, you need multiple sources of traffic to grow your forum.

When I was younger, sure.

 

Now, forums for me are a hobby. While I hope for an active forum, I don't care much about the growth of them. It just gives me something fun to do. i like the feeling of coming to a forum with new posts waiting but I'm not going to attempt to weigh down a lot of hope to growth.

 

If I was attempting to make money, it would be different.

I'm a bit worried but not too much. I understand that many people are stuck on social media, and it's hard to compete against that. Even Discord is taking away activity from forums, despite being different. I used to get upset when people wouldn't join my forums, but now I kind of came to accept that unless I'm offering something people can't get anywhere else I probably won't have many new registrations. One forum I do own has 75 members on it and that's quite a bit for a forum.