As some of you may have read before I have had my website integrated with a forum to limit downloads for guests, basically so I can gather emails and build a list. Despite having 26 members join in my 1st week they dont seem to want to post very much apart from 1 or 2 so I started a promotion by offering a free domain for the user with the highest post count by the end of May.

Is this a good promotion or bad?

Please visit link in my sig line if your interested

You won't have to wait very long to see if it works, but I don't think there's much risk in it, so you might as well try it. The upside is it's cheap for you and could generate activity. The downside is that it's cheap and might not generate much interest because people can get a domain for about $7.

Thats a fair point, I obviously wanted to keep the risk down whilst creating some activity within the forum, yet again more people are signing up but verylittle activity, maybe the prize on offer could be made more attractive

Its certainly worth a shot, don't rely on promotions though, just try to initiate good topics and conversations and eventually the community will build, its not an overnight thing.

Seems like a lot of trouble for someone to go through for a $9.00 domain.

A good promoter would see the success of getting 20 signups as key, and would realise that the correct thing to do is to focus on getting 200 signups.

In all forms of sales you need a good quantity of people before whatever you want from them starts to be seen in any noticeable volume.