When do you open up your forum?

[Altair]

When do you feel it it is right to open up your forum? Do you open it up the same day or wait to get more content? Do you wait until a certain about of members. Which do you do and how successful has that been?

 

[Oblivion Knight]

Personally I like to open up a forum pretty early on, let your members see the developments as they happen and feel as if they've been a part of that journey.

Forums are hard enough to grow these days, the sooner you can get things started and have a bit of activity buzzing, the better!

 

[Xyphien]

It depends on the type of forum, and the content at hand. With my largest forum I opened up the same day I made it, it was a 4 hour project and I mass promoted it and gained around 1k members the first day which started posting like crazy. I try to feel for my audience first, if I know something will be harder to promote I will give it time and build up content, if I feel it'll be a success I'll start it same day.

This site I waited until my custom plugin was finished developing. I'm not too worried about content as of yet, however I do want and strive to release at least 2-4 premium articles a month. Other than that I'm not worried as I'm focusing all of my time on the SEO to gain members over time.

 

[Altair]

It depends on the type of forum, and the content at hand. With my largest forum I opened up the same day I made it, it was a 4 hour project and I mass promoted it and gained around 1k members the first day which started posting like crazy. I try to feel for my audience first, if I know something will be harder to promote I will give it time and build up content, if I feel it'll be a success I'll start it same day.

This site I waited until my custom plugin was finished developing. I'm not too worried about content as of yet, however I do want and strive to release at least 2-4 premium articles a month. Other than that I'm not worried as I'm focusing all of my time on the SEO to gain members over time.

WTF. 1k members in the first day. Thats insane.

 

[Xyphien]

WTF. 1k members in the first day. Thats insane.

It was a very niche forum, and within the first 6 months it became the largest site of it's kind for about a year and a half before I deployed and my lack of activity and updates killed the site I also got two huge celebrities in the field to become staff on it so they told their followers, etc. One had 16k subscribers on youtube at the time would make weekly videos of the site, and we'd host tournaments, events, etc.

 

[Demon_skeith]

Damn, 1k in one day, never seen that happen in my 14 years of being on forums.

I would say don't open a forum until it has some content. A blank forum is a waste of time.

 

[sincerem]

If I'm done creating a forum, I'll simply open it up when I've created some kind of contents to keep other invited busy at least for them to learn how to create quality posts/threads too.