Most people over estimate the minimum number of people needed to make a site look busy. Its around 20-30 [1]. Can you get about 20 zealous people to participate on your website everyday?
[1] I've moderated private invite only forums with 20 members that generated 12-15 threads everyday! And yes - these threads were busy. 20 people were easily spending a total of more than 10 hours on the forum everyday.
Action Summary:
- Find 20 people who like your concept and invite them to participate before you launch. Make them your beta testers and ask them for their input. Give them non-monetary rewards (tshirts etc is a good idea). Let these folks populate your site and make it look busy.
- Then on launch day, have a strategy in place that does generate 500-1000 visitors per day. Thats probably about $50-100 in ad expense per day if you don't have a viral aspect to your social website and your users don't drive traffic.
Another rookie mistake to avoid, is fragmentation. Say you want to start a forum on topic X. Just have a forum for X till you gain traction.
A mistake many people make, is to have subforums X1, X2, X3, etc, from the get go. It makes what little traffic you have seem even less. Start with one forum, and then fragment according to the dictates of the main forum. In any case, the sub forums you will end up with will rarely be the same ones you envisaged before launch.
About the visitors on launch day ... It really depends on your community niche. When you have absolutely run out of ideas, hire people on MechanicalTurk to post on your site. Be warned though that most of the posts will be rubbish, and of the "Hi, I'm new here" variety.
[1] I've moderated private invite only forums with 20 members that generated 12-15 threads everyday! And yes - these threads were busy. 20 people were easily spending a total of more than 10 hours on the forum everyday.
Action Summary:
- Find 20 people who like your concept and invite them to participate before you launch. Make them your beta testers and ask them for their input. Give them non-monetary rewards (tshirts etc is a good idea). Let these folks populate your site and make it look busy.
- Then on launch day, have a strategy in place that does generate 500-1000 visitors per day. Thats probably about $50-100 in ad expense per day if you don't have a viral aspect to your social website and your users don't drive traffic.