How to increase members for a new forum?

[aceofadsense]

I have just created a new Wordpress theme support forum that can help Wordpressers to get useful information or support for their questions. My forum is very new, it has not got any posts yet and I want to increase number of visitors and members there.
Can you guys guide me ways to promote my forum and increase members for it? Do I need to invest money to advertise or promote it for more traffic? if So, what are the best places to go?

 

[PTTed]

A forum is a community website. It is ridiculously hard to build a community starting from just one person.

My advice is to form a team of people willing to conspire to work on the site together. Reward them with equity in the website and a generous share in the profits. If you are able to assemble a good team with enough people in it (about 12 or so would be ideal) then you can build a small and thriving community right away. That way when new users come across the forum, they will stick around and hopefully participate.

Form a team first. Unless you want to drive yourself insane.

 

[professorrosado]

Since I read your other post, you should develop your skills a bit further (or just flat out outsource now) to create a few themes and offer them for free on webmaster forums, etc on the net and on theme repositories (even WP).

The key here is to add somewhere with the theme a link and an offer that brings the new user of your theme to your forum. I would add it as a support link and also add some other value, plugin or some training, etc., to entice these users to your forum.

Another thing is to create content online: courses, webinars, and solicit joint ventures with other marketers who can add your themes to their bonuses or as a central feature of their offer.

Another idea is to reach offline businesses with websites using Wordpress and shape your offer for the busy entrepreneur who has no one but him or herself to keep their website running, etc. There's a lot of them out there.

Although Facebook can shut your group down whenever they like, it is a viable source of leads. Create a group for every forum category (if divided by types of WP users or sites) and run some FB PPC to add folowers / likes to your pages or groups. Add an incentive to move FB users to your website for further interaction and sharing.

I can keep going, but these should suffice to get you up and running. Good Luck!