I want to recommend Overture.com as a way to get members, especially if you're running a board that is part of a product or service.

I'm an author and musician, and I started my board to get people to keep coming back to my site so that they'd eventually be interested in my books and CDs. I've been running my board for about a year, and up until about 2 weeks ago, I only had about 110 members.

I've known about Overture for awhile, but they're really, really strict. My site used to center around alternative health and disease-free living. Overture is one of those paid-per-click keyword generators. They put sponsored links on Yahoo!, MSN, AskJeeves, and a few of the other big boy search engines. I had very little content on my front page, so whenever I tried a keyword with them, like "health," they denied it, saying that my site was too vague and that keywords had to be specific. So, I changed up my site a bit and started focusing on metaphysics. I paid for 5 keywords about 2 weeks ago and spent about $250. In 2 days, that money was drained, and I had about 1000 people visit my site. I also had about 30 people register, and of them, many have started posting.

I know it sounds like a lot of money, but these are some damn good results. You're reaching people who are already online.

The only problem is, you've really, really, really got to follow Overture's rules; otherwise, they won't approve your keywords.

Another trick I found that works is that they will let you link to forum topics. I wrote a long post on Randy Weaver and the Ruby Ridge massacre and linked to the keywords "Randy Weaver" and "Ruby Ridge." Overture approved these and I got about 100 clickthroughs on just these keyterms.

Anyway, somebody may have already posted this here, but it's really exciting, and if you're running a really unique discussion board and having trouble getting members, this is definitely a way to do it.

Dan
www.endlesspath.com

It got you new posters but did it make you any money?

Julie
The Swingers Board

I didn't have much to sell at the time I did the experiment. I did get a few people sign up for a subscription to my members' only forum, so yes, it did, and some bought my books and CDs. But, now that I see the power of the traffic, I'm working on putting up some more "commercial" areas of the site that give visitors more opportunity to pull out their wallets. Regardless, the traffic is there.

www.fantasticforums.com