How does everyone drive traffic to their websites and magazine forums?

We are just kicking off forums and have a few ideas:
- promote an "on the web" table of contents page in the print magazine
- include them in the e-newsletters
- guide readers who write in with questions to ask them on our forums


What have you found to be successful?

We tried a one-page house ad monthly that gave the bare bones of what would appear on the Web site daily. It didn't really generate enough interest though. What seemed to work the best is running promos on our weekly e-mail newsletters.

It's a hard assignment, trust me!

I keep a template saved in my email program that basically says, "Hey, that's a great question, it would be perfect for our magazine's online forums, located at ..."

Every time I receive a general technical question from a reader, I reply with that text. Of course, I modify it however necessary, even suggesting to them what subforum their question would be most appropriate in.

This has really worked for us, and I see those same questions generally appearing on our forums a day or two later.

The other thing I do is make sure to post our monthly editorials on the forum. When we get a letter to the editor, I respond, thanking the reader, and telling them that we'll try to get it in the magazine. But I also give them the specific link to that forum thread, and ask them if, in the meanwhile, they would post their comments there, too. Sometimes, that gets a good discussion going with other forum members.

You can spend days on end worrying about this and there is no set formula.

If you have a well designed website with good content and add ons such as forums and podcasts it helps, but a lot of traffic is through word of mouth.

There are professionals who will help you, but at a charge.

My instinct is to use google and other search engines to tell me what I should be doing.

One of our online editors designed a simple one page sheet describing some of the most interesting recent topics from our forums area to pass out at trade shows. That seems to have helped boost his number of registered forum users, and seems like a smart idea to me that could work for many magazines.