How do I promote my forum?

;)

how do i verify the forum to google...anybody has any ideas? this is what google asks for: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/verify?hl=en

There's no need, all forums and submited, crawled and indexed by default.

And please don't use this thread to promote forums, you can start a new topic under 'Promote Your Forum Here'

If you have any suggestions on how to promote your forum, please add them here.

And the reasons it's important to keep posting, even on new forums, is because google and msn will index your forum and display it in search results, check out one admin's experience with this here:

http://support.lefora.com/2008/08/07/congrats-on-the-great-seo/

Not sure if this is the right place or not, but I just created a new forum, got it all set up, when it said finished and invite friends, all of them keep saying it wont let them into the site to register or something like that.

Thanks.

I am not a Lefora Support Person but this is what I get when I look to register at your site. It says the person must register and be approved by the site. You should see the request to approve Memberships in your Admin Panel in the Memberships section if someone does so. Also check which Browser they are using if they are getting a black page when trying to register with Konqueror this is a known issue. Either use a different Browser or set konq to spoof Browser to IE or Mozilla.

Hope this helps.

Hi Bingodate, we'll be releasing widgets in the future to help with those types of promotions, in the meantime:

1) You can create your own banner ad for your forum and paste that on other sites. Here's a site that helps you create a banner ad: http://www.adverstore.com/free_banners/

2) One option for affiliate or referral link tracking, is to use third party click tracking. Basically, you'll give out a different url to members, like example.com/a45s which redirects to your forum, then you can track how many people clicked through the link. Some services that do this are:
http://budurl.com
http://www.clickaudit.com
* http://www.linkcounter.com

Another option (not the perfect solution),you could turn on 'membership approval required to post', and when a member joins, they are promoted with a field to enter a message or phrase to the admin. You could ask that they put in the referring member username here (not a perfect solution, but an idea).

I dont see a "send invites" button anywhere on my forum. Where is this?

we've temporarily have disabled 'invite friends' while we upgrade the feature, more here:

http://support.lefora.com/2008/10/29/sneak-peak-new-feature-to-get-more-members-into-yo/page1/

hmmmm

It seems there is a problem on invites, sorry about that. We'll remove the link while we hunt down the issue.

When it goes back online, you may want to redo sending the invites, sorry about that.

thanks for the info

Hmmm... I went to use the invite friends and found the ticked boxes of the imported just kept happening to the bottom of the page, even though there were no names next to them!

Hi ella

I'm not too sure what seems to be the problem, could you give some more information on what is occuring?

Ok,
The dialogue box that has the names has boxes beside the names. But what is happening is that the boxes for ticking are dropping out of the dialogue box and running to the bottom of the page/screen - just the boxes, not the names. So the box might show, say 10 names - but as I have over 250 contacts, those tickboxes are just dropping a bit like candle wax until they reach the bottom of the screen outside of the box. (If all that makes sense).