Great work, i know how hard it is. I like your theme, more like DP but in short and simple manner. wish you success
That's because it's another DP wannabe. Whenever you have a huge successful forum you get dozens of copycats. I have seen many copies of my forum as well. They pretty much all fail and imho it's a huge mistake to use another forum as the basis for your own forum. You should make original categories and structure. If people wanted a DP-like forum they would just stay at DP.
Really? Are you at least breaking even? I have never spent more than hosting and maybe some prizes for a forum. Forums don't succeed imho because of marketing via paid ads very often. They are communities and you really need to attract members willing to stay. To do that you need to have plenty of activity and hard core members. btw ever notice how similar your site looks to V7N? I just realized that today. You have the categories of DP and the layout of V7N. Where is the originality and reason for me to use your forum instead of one of those? You're growing but not fast enough imho. I been to your site 10 times just to peek and comment but I have no inclination to join. Maybe consider a contest or something in the header to entice signup. You know your stats better but than me but what's your bounce rate? Is it over 50%? What's the unique visitors to signups per day ratio? Please take my comments as constructive criticism as I always want other forums to succeed.
Honestly speaking, I started serious monetization starting this month. If you would look at the right navbar we have some ads there; all ad spots are sold out for this month. Plus there are AdSense. I am not trying to make profit yet really. Hopefully I would be able to do that in near future. We dont spend same every month. When we have contests on the forum expenses increase. We can always choose the paid and non-paid marketing options. I do ads only for special occasions. There are some monthly marketing costs though for paying people who work with me on marketing. Absolutely. As you know for any new community its a tough work. But I think we have significant amount of repeat people. There are lot of room for improvement on this, yes. I hear a lot its a dp clone. I guess I have some work due to change this For most of the new forums around, I think we have made good progress. Thats my opinion though comparing some other new ones. At some point the speed of growth would get faster I hope. We have a contest starting dec 10. Good point. I always try to learn from others, I am glad you took time make those points. Thank you.
Thats a posting contest. 3 prizes, $100. You may check out more here webcosmoforums.com/webcosmo-forums/12728-contest-dec-10-2009-jan-10-2010-a.html