Generating Webmaster Traffic

Hi folks,

I was wondering if anyone could tell me of anywhere that sells webmaster traffic? I am trying to populate a new webmaster resource message board.

Alternatively, I would love to hear of any tips on how to do this, for example running a competition.

I would suggest not to buy traffic.. it rarely works.

Instead what you could do is get webmasters to post on your forums for cash or gifts. For this contact the webmasters directly via various forums.

Thanks for the reply  :)
Thats a great idea.

Anyone else have any tips?

I don't think that this would be a good thing to do, because it is spam, and they will find out and ban you. The best way - and more right - is to post threads on simillar boards to yours using a signature.

Now regarding traffic don't expect much from paying solutions. Webmaster sites and especially forums, is a very saturated market so any kind of advertising wont have great results, as the purpose will be branding, not traffic.

So my last advice is to have a unique site. I believe that webdigity wouldn't be here if there wasn't so many unique features in the site, and a stable source of traffic which is the rest of our sites in the network.

Hope my post helped :)

You could always pay an online reputation management service to help you....
sorry couldn't resist, however some pointers.

Unique content, find your niche stick to it, if you can't find a niche find a selling point that makes you unique, Web Digity is not unique in its discussions but it has its own unique points in particular I think its attitude can be seen as a selling point, I have yet to come across a single flame or troll here.

Unique Content, buying articles is fine, though often impractical a better method would be approach bloggers and other writers and ask them to write a piece in exchange for kudos/money/links what ever, this will help you get a) a group of people interested in seeing your site succeed, b a set of genuinely unique content that will be nicely indexed.

Offer multiple services, I was looking at what services I use and I realised if Google didn't exist I would not be on the Internet (well not quite true but you get the point) They are my mail (gmail), My company mail (hosted apps), Diary (hosted apps), my RSS reader (reader). How can you add service, for webmasters this is perhaps an easy one simply provide tools and services or acts as a broker for such tools and services. But make sure you add value.

Let people know about your community, link bait, look at viral marketing, look for collaborators a novel approach talk to your competition (other forums, sites).

Make it exclusive, a favoured trick of both google and many web 2.0 products the closed Beta, this has 2 advantages, one no one knows how much content you have and 2 everyone wants to be in the club. Your best bet is to try and get an active beta group of 100 or so users to start participating, use a blog to publish good articles and discussion and then open your site up fully.

Finally if you want to make money you could always go down the route of getting a company to manage your site or just help promote it, this sort of thing is normally done on percentage profit basis, oops was that another plug bad Tim :-)

What I meant was to post in the Buy or Sell/Trade section asking webmasters if they would be interested in the offer. I did not mean to encourage spam.

Thank you all SO much for the fantastic advice :D