How to Grow a Forum in a Tiny Niche? Posted April 24th, 2006 in Mailbag

Hi,

I have recently started a business information and community site for where I live the North East of England. I have a forum on the site.

I want the forum to fill up with messages although it just doesn’t seem to be happening, do you think it is worth paying someone to post messages? The site is very segmented towards north east businesses so it’s hard to attract users to the forum. Do you have any advice?

After the weekend, I have many new mailbag questions that need to be attended to. I wanted to begin with one I feel is a common problem with many forum owners. I hear from many small / new forum owners that are having the hardest time getting traffic and activity to their board. Let’s take a closer look at this issue and determine what can be done.

First, I feel this is an unecessary problem for many forum owners. I believe that before ever putting a forum, you should first take a very close look at the market to determine if the forum is even needed, if it will be useful, and if it is marketable. If the answer is an astounding no to those questions, then it is time to rethink what you are doing. I would say you might even go as far as scratching the idea and starting over from scratch, this time spending a good deal of time planning in preparation for the future community.

That being said, I feel that ultra niche communities do have a chance to succeed depending on the niche. In the case of your forum where the topic is general business discussion pertaining to a small area of the world, it seems clear to me that in order to succeed you will very likely have to have a clever “offline” marketing plan in place. This may not be what you are looking for and more expense than you care to handle, and if that is the case than you may want to concentrate on being an information portal and not an online community. If you do have the budget to proceed with marketing your new forum, then approaching businesses with an offline strategy will be best. I feel you could spend hours and many dollars pursuing growth online with little to no results in this situation.

I wish you the very best!