Forum members are hard to come by, especially for a new forum that doesn’t rank at the top of search engines just yet. Forums at the top of the SERPs will get more traffic, and thus more members, naturally. For those struggling to find members, you have to look no further then the internet’s largest social network site: MySpace.

MySpace is a gold-mine for finding targetted visitors to your forum. There is a specific way to go about approaching the MySpace members so that it doesn’t come across as spam. In this post I’ll go over a few tips and suggestions on how to convert MySpace members to members of your own forum.

What do you offer?

First you will need to make sure your forum offers members something that MySpace doesn’t. MySpace does have forums on the site, however, they are usually filled with junk and not easily approachable for a new poster. Make sure your forum offers MySpace members a reason to visit. Maybe you have better content? If you run a Zelda Forum, then maybe you offer cheats and glitches that a member on MySpace wouldn’t be able to find there. Maybe you offer videos that aren’t found on MySpace or Youtube? Whatever it is, give them a reason to come visit.

Where to get the MySpace members?

Once you’ve determined you have something more then an empty forum to offer MySpace members, you need to know where to find them. Luckily for you, MySpace offers several different avenues to searching for your niche group of people. The worst thing you can do is send out mass bulletins to just some random MySpace account with 10,000 friends. It won’t work. You have to send your message to a targetted group. Once in your MySpace account, you need to click Groups at the top. Search your keyword and then join all the groups that are related to your keyword. So if you are running a forum on Fashion, you will want to join all the MySpace groups related to fashion, and trust me… there should be plenty of them.

Once you’re a member to all the groups, you need to begin your friend adding process. I recommend using a program like Friend Blaster Pro, or else you will be manually adding thousands of friends for a long time. Also, in every group will you see there is a forum. Be sure to add the members who post on those forums, because they will likely want to post on your forum as well.

So let’s say you’ve added all the friends from the groups you joined. Now what? Where else can you get members? The next place a recommend you look on MySpace for more friends is the friend’s list of everyone you added. For example, you have a forum on Zelda. You notice on your friend’s list you have someone with the name ‘Huge Zelda Fan’ and his profile is completely decked out in Zelda gear. It might be a good idea to add all of his friends, because odd’s are some of his friends will have the same interest.

MySpace is filled with millions and millions of potential forum members. You just have to know where to find them. I used to run a city-specific forum, and MySpace was far and above the #1 source for forum members. Simply hit the browse members button and set search only within 10 miles of a certain zip code and bingo. Instantly you will find hundreds and hundreds of targetted, internet savvy members. If people are members on MySpace, the chances of them signing up to be a member on another forum is exponentially greater then if the person is not a member.

How to convert MySpace members?

So what do you do once you have all these friends in your MySpace profile? Tomorrow’s post will help you convert MySpace members to become members on your own forum.