Converting surfers to active registered users

My forums are stil fairly new. I have a several lurkers checking out the forums, but only a handful of those register, and an even smaller number post. What is the best way to convert surfers to active users?

You could offer a contest where the one who posts the most that month gets a $50 prize or something.

$50?? I would want to have some traffic to be giving away that sort of money!

Well, how about add a minimum post requirement of say 50 posts and add a little prize money for second and third place. That might get posters more interested. And, make the prize money 1 year away so that you're visitors don't just post and run. :)

Really understand your forums theme and only target those forum titles initially. If you have promoted your forum with specific keywords the visitor is there for one of two reasons.

Simply to browse or maybe search a question
Or they will register and post if they feel comfortable with the atmosphere of the forum and they will get an answer in short term.

Creating excessive forums when beginning will take a guest off topic. Start small and target the traffic to your main forum(s). You can add other discussion forums once the membership grows and activity is continuous.

That idea makes a lot of sense. That was well said. I would add that you may want to take a look at your stats and note the keywords visitors that show up most frequently and their landing pages. Updated these pages especially so that they find something useful when they first visit.

How to drive traffic to your forum? One forum I know and have joined (it is also about webmaster talk), gives credits for every post that their members make. The credits is convertible to cash and the members/posters even use these credits to pay for services that they need from other members. Another forum gives an incentive to those who achieve a certain no. of posts and who becomes Senior member (100 posts) , Gold member (150 posts) - egold. Most of the incentives are in form of credits convertible to cash. You might take this into consideration.

I agree with geline. When I learned that a particular forum will convert your posts to cash, I frequent this and make sure that I post even if it's two or three. Monetary or some other kinds of reward is a motivating factor for people to stay.

Almost everybody is motivated by money so get this to work, even if just a little incentive, posters will be motivated to move on.

Interesting perspective.


If your forum has a certain content which interests people enough to find it with an online search, why would you have to pay them to stick around?

One thing I have noticed with new forums is that the people starting them have little interest in posting content. Why start a forum if you, yourself is not even interested in posting?

Forum posters drive traffic to your site and they also encourage those who are not yet members to join the wagon. A forum is dead when nobody gets in there and to do this, I believe that the forum admin should do all means to reach the goal of making the forum a lively site.