My forum is exploitn.com I started it last week with the support of people I have. I'm trying to get good google results, and trying to get back links but I don't know how. I am not sure what I can do because I already submitted my RSS feed to a few sites, and submitted my site to Del.icio.us, Digg, etc. Any other ideas? I have Google Adsense and would love thousands of impressions as well which i dont know how to achieve.
Small community admin tips, tricks and solutions Hope this help. Hint: Forum usually don't convert well if you choose adsense.
Comment on blogs. Provide something in return for posts to attract people to post (Info Domains is a good idea as they are very cheap). Write tutorials and submit them to tutorial submission sites. Do some directory submissions.
I like the idea on commenting on blogs. Can you explain do I need to comment on blogs with re="nofollow" or without that tag?
Dofollow blogs will work better. You can find a bunch at http://dofollowblogs.com and various Dofollow blog search engines such as http://w3ec.com/dofollow/.
If you want your forum to have more posts you could use Amazon's website Mturk. You can hire people to post for cheap which will make your forum more active and draw people into discussions.
You need to make your board unique, and offer things that other forums either don't or can't. From what I can see your forum looks pretty standard..standard skin...small plain banner... Here's what I'd suggest: 1) Either make your forum's skin fixed width or use a different / custom one. Presently there are cast areas of empty space which makes your forum look very unattractive. 2) Sort the banner out. In my honest opinion it doesn't really look like a whole lot of effort has gone into the current one. More important, the banner should represent what your board is about...if you offer hosting your banner should scream servers and fibre optic cable, if you're a chess forum you should have various chess refrences in your banner. When I see yours, I just think "wtf?". 3) Try to get rid of the adsense if you can. Are you really getting enough revenue to make it worh keeping the adsense? Whilst it doesn't bother me and some people use ad-block, a lot of people get easily turned away at the sight of ads on a website. You'll probably find if you remove them for logged in users then regular visitors to your site may well visit more often and log in / post. 4) For the love of DigitalPoint, please get rid of that pop-up box that hassles you every time you load the page. When people visit the site, they know they're not registered / logged in, and if they wanted to be it's quite simple for them to scroll to the top of the page and hit the "register" / "login" button. I was trying to browse around your forums and for a few seconds on every page I had to wait for that annoying box to fade away...not cool! I'll be honest though, at least you've bought IPB and a domain name, shows you care about the forum and want to make it work. It's quite shocking these days to see how many people use Free Forum hosts and those ".co.cc" domain names...makes me shudder. As the others have said you need to get out and promote your site. Fact of the matter is that you will not get any guests if you sit back and rely on searches to get you seen. From my experience, these are the best ways to get your forum seen: 1) Promote on "Promotion Forums" such as forumpromotion.net. There are loads out there, a few quick searches in google for things like "Promotion forum", "promote my forum", "get my forum seen" should provide some sufficient results. 2) Put your forum's link in sigs and post post post! The more people see your link, the more they'll visit it. Simple. 3) Submit your site to Topsites and Directories. There are hundreds of them out there and they are great for getting good exposure. 4) Affiliate / link exchange / banner exchange with other sites that share the same interest. People will see your link / afiliate icon and will visit..because that's what people do if they're curious about something. That should be enough to get you onyour feet for now. I'll keep checking back, seeing how you get along. I hope this post helps you in one way or another
I guess it is not easy to get forum grow in a short time. You will definitely need to spend some quality time to input good content for discussion. I am kind of lack in this part so my forum is moving very slowly in terms of users' participation. Unlikely here in Digital Point, it has a good turn out of users' participation.
It is difficult to get forum in a good position. First remove all ads until you get some good members. I see a forum before a year, it is new and i accidentally visited that forum again from my bookmarks, now it has only 4000 posts. "4000 posts for a year". So it is difficult to get a forum. But if u try you can achieve. So be trying.
Post on like minded forums and just keep posting it is hard work to get a forum off the ground but it will come with time.
1) My skin was fixed before but made it full. Can you tell me why I should do this? I am not 100% sure what you are referring to as white space...wouldn't there be more blank space If the forum was fixed? I don't mind if It's fixed or not, but If you give me a good reason, might as well set it to fixed If It's going to help me out in the long run. 2) Haha, sorry about the banner. It was a little fun we had between me and another website. I'll be changing it shortly. Thanks for this, because without you telling me, I wouldn't notice. Now that I think about it, It really does effect how people think of the site. 3) Thanks for your input on adsense. I make quiet a lot, and want to use it. I plan on removing it in the future though possibly. 4) Done! Thanks for the tip. I agree with you, It is annoying so I removed it. --- Do you recommend any certain top sites? Also, about affilate exchanging and such, would it be fine running like a affilate manager on a seperate page or should I have affilates in the footer possibly with a button? Not sure how to approach it. --------------- @kingsofsanda: How does that work (especially with a forum)? Sorry, i'm new. Thanks everyone!
1) White space is mostly found between the forum names / descriptions and the column showing post count. Making it fixed moves all the main content close together so the user's eyes don't have to wonder all around the page to find what they're looking for. Yes, you're right in that more space will be made if it's fixed, but i've always found the user's attention naturally gets channeled towards the center, as it's a beight content area on a dark background. 2) Not a problem. If you go with the fixed width template you should be able to make a full size banner that fits quite nicely. 3) Well, seeing as you're making quite a bit from it then you may as well keep it. You could always introduce revenue sharing to entice new members to join up and post? 4) Much better! -- I can't really recommend any topsites or anything because I can't tell what your site is about . Perhaps you could add a small welcome message to your forum telling members what your community is all about, what your intentions are etc etc.. . With regard to the affiliates, i'd add them to the footer. Of course, remember to add rel="nofollow" attribute to the links to keep on top of SEO.
how about a referral contest for your members? offer a prize for the best referrer... consider adding a plugin to monitor referrals
First, you shall focus more on your post, the more quality and informative post, the higher potential to gain traffic/member. At the same time, try make post at forum with same niche (use your signature to promote). Also, never ignore SEO
With a new forum, you can expect at least a year before you get any "real" traffic. At around 6 - 8 months the traffic should start to pick up and after 2 years you should have an established community. This also depends on your marketing approach. As an example, my main form of promotion is videos. Over the past 20 months I have uploaded around 320 videos to youtube. These videos average around 10,000 - 15,000 views daily. This provides my site with a steady stream of targeted traffic. Depending on your "nitch" video marketing might be an option for you. But then again, maybe not.