Does anyone here use paid advertising for their site? I've run Facebook ads, Bing Ads, and spent maybe $20 or $30 on other sites. I did get a lot of hits, but not many registrations.
Is paid advertising worth it, esp. for a personal forum?
You got what you paid for, hits. You won't get many registrations if any as the traffic for those are people who just visit the site for the click money and move on.
If you really want members, I suggest post loop. You will get members and if your site is good enough a few people will stick around.
It could be worth it since the people who visit your site may bookmark your website, and visit or register at a later time if they enjoy your site.
Many people these days are too lazy to register, and make an account. Maybe adding a free e-mail news letter to contact and convince people to register for an account via a weekly or monthly e-mail newsletter would be easier. Using Facebook Login may also increase the number of people who post since many people have a Facebook account, so logging in with a Facebook account is simpler and easier than making a new account.
Paid advertising's effectiveness is limited unless you are spending a lot of money. I mean anything under a couple hundred dollars is basically not worth it. You'd be better to save your money and just try promoting yourself on social networks, directories and other sites. The effect is about the same and you'll save a bunch of money you could use elsewhere.
Though any advertising you do comes with a risk of bringing people who only lurk and never contribute. (Or more likely, just bring a flood of bots to crawl your site multiple times.)
Sometimes lurkers may recommend your site to friends, or they decide to not lurk anymore by being a member of your forum after enjoying reading post on forums.
I appreciate everyone's feedback! If I do more paid ads, I'll stick to this one site I've been using which offers a multitude of different advertising services for low cost.
I don't think they are worth the money, to be honest. Sure, they provide some great traffic, which contributes to the stats count, but other than that, I wouldn't bother. I'd rather spend my money on purchasing content, which, if unique, would bring in the traffic itself. IT would also get people to register, as great content pull's in the members.
Paying for Good content could work as well.I think if your site already has a lot of good content, buying a text link or banner for a few months on a related website which has similar content to your site can help bring in visitors from their website.
There is also paid blog posts where you pay money for a post with your website link in the blog post, so readers can read a blog post, and click on your website link at the end of the post posted on blogs which you pay to post an article related to your site.
Some website owners also pay Twitter users with a lot of real followers to tweet a link to their thousands of followers.
Here's a good hint: NEVER fall in the trap of those who think there's no need to pay for your web hosting. You must be prepared to invest some money into your forum.
If you are a starter in forum administration (not to say a newbie), you could manage with only about $40 a year. That includes a domain name ($10) and hosting. If you don't want to spend more money, you will also need a free forum software – I will deal with this choice later on.
On the other hand, if you think you are ready to start it big, you'll have to separate a larger amount of money, probably over $100. Again, you need it form a domain name, a better hosting, and this time a paid forum software.
Absolutely! I've been using paid hosting since 1997. And I now use Xenforo for my forum. I invested $140 into it so far. Well worth it, I love Xenforo.
I've paid for many types of advertising and very rarely does it pay off. You just have to find the right strategy for the right niche. I finally found a way that seems to be working better for me without breaking the bank on my GPT site, but there are a lot of factors in play.
