How do you promote a new forum?

website is a forum

[skunker]

Hello,
I bought a nice medical related domain name (e.g. www.MEDICALforum.com).

This will be a forum-only site, nothing more. I know these are more difficult to market when starting off, but does anyone have any tips on how to do link development, search engine optimization, etc for a brand new forum?

Is it a good idea to create a blog or something for content and link the forum to it?

Thanks for any tips!

[tangor]

Forums are not blogs... or even websites. Something completely different. Falls into the social networking category, but leans more toward community. Forums take WORK. Webmasterworld is a forum, for example. Forums only work if there is a community of members. Get that part done FIRST. The members will then be your best advertisement as they will tell two friends, and those will tell two friends, etc.

As to how to let folks know the forum exists it sounds like you already know what needs be done.

[Mathmo]

first: tell all your workmates about it (I assume you are working in the medical field..)

secondly post to related blogs/forums with this forum of yours as your sig

[Lexur]

...and do not forget to write every day five or ten posts with two or three identities until it takes cruise-speed.

[majjk]

Having launched a couple of forums, my experience is this;

forget seo, your forum would need to target more key phrases than you could ever handle. rarely every will people enter the site having used the same search phrase. as already mentioned, you need members, active and enthusiastic members that post a lot. what really helps is if you have another site, on the same topic and having good traffic, that can divert some traffic and future members to you. as has already been mentioned, create several member profiles (10, 20 or maybe even 30) and use those to post fake posts, giving the impression of a forum that is alive. then post a few posts every day by those fake members, and keep it going until you get some real members. even with another site diverting traffic to you you may have to continue like this for many weeks. in case of no other supporting site, months...

[Bulletproof WEB]

You have to make more threads and posts.You have to get forum users consistently.They should be repeated visitors.First thing you have to do is fill atleast 10 threads in every category.Social bookmarking works nice for forums.Try that.

[majjk]

Don't do the worst mistake of them all... start a forum, having very few posts, with too many categories/subforums. A forum with 15 posts may look new, but still worthwhile posting at... while a forum with 15 posts in 10 different subforums, each containing 1-2 posts look dead, and no-one will post. Start with one or two categories, and only split into smaller categories when the numbers support it.

[sevamaster]

Firstly you can engage some peaple to write posts to promote forum.
It must help in the begining

[ezygamelink]

i think you should create your topic and post your article about your forum every day then submit directory and social bookmark too.

[hamids54]

I am webmaster of one medical website/forum but not english
I started it april 2004 now i have 10k daily.

from the begining one website that had 30000 alexa rank inserted my forum
on its site (as iframe)I think thefirst members came from there and coming
also as yet.

Direct address / Bookmarks :3.4%
Links from an Internet Search Engine :4.1%
Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines) :92.3 %

it was too hard...maybe 18 hours a day i spent time for many years