This is part I of a series of articles that will teach you how to build a business around any discussion board that you may want to start. I’m also posting this to the Warrior Forums.

First step : More members

  • I made it super easy to register. My forum is a phpBB board. That’s an awful way to start if you want members. The registration form is so ugly and there’s way too many useless fields. Who uses ICQ anyway ?
    I got rid of all the useless fields and only kept Username, Email, Password, Password confirm. And I made the fields big, and I mean, HUGE, like on the wordpress sign up form.
  • I also made the registration link more visible. I put a registration form at the top, and one on the left. It says “subscribe to our newsletter” because… well people would rather want to read your newsletter than to WRITE on your forums!
  • I put little incentives to sign up. Basically people are curious. What i did for instance is replace every user’s avatar with a little smiling picture that reads “this is not my real picture. Want to see the real one ? Sign up !”

Read the second part (how i turned these new members into fans) here.

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Turn your forum members into fans »

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 12:06 and is filed under English Content, Forum Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.