As of writing this, www.movieforumz.com has been running for 4 days. There is between 10 and 50 users on at a time(including guests, usually all guests actually). Around 75% of the users are bookmarking the site(based on cookies & ip). Day 1 - 20 uniques Day 2 - 21 uniques Day 3 - 556 uniques Day 4 - 1400+ uniques(day is still not over) 63% of traffic has no referrer(direct visit) 37% of the traffic is from forum/email referrers 1 visitor came from search engines, didn't expect much yet I'm expecting great things from the site, but my biggest problem is that people aren't signing up or posting much. I don't want to close off the forums to registered users only. I was thinking about having a special forum that only registered users could use, but I don't know what I would put in it.. any ideas? Thanks!
My marketing techniques are my own. I would consider contributing them to the thread if you even attempted to answer my question
I went over and took a look at your forum. Good stuff! Aren't there some legal issues with it however? Anyways, about your question, I think you should let anonymous people post to start until the site grows and is active, then cut it off possibly into a few sections. One being that only registered users can see the topics that include the movie/show URLs, and the other where anonymous can also post but that forum is just general discussion. How did you go about jumping from 20 uniques to 500+ in one day, I understand if you don't want to give it out, maybe a hint? I recently started a community forum of my own and I'm looking for ways to get the word out and have people join up. Good luck with your site though, looks great so far.
Those who are curious about increasing traffic - very easy - mySpace marketing. KWs such as "free movies" will definitely bring in traffic. But the it will be your site that should be interesting to lock the visitor on the site for a while.
suggestion: store cookies, so after a guest views X number of topics they are told they have viewed X number of topics and must either clear their cookies or register if this helps you get more registered users you could leave me a rep =p
You must put a quick registration thing on top of each page viewed by a guest. I have seen it on a few sites and it works wonders, you could also start controversial topics and sign up with a few IDs yourself and agree to the controversial side so that people sign up and speak out that its wrong, this works wonders as well! IT
One thing I have experimented for long with, is that, celebrity sites "MUST HAVE" a catchy design targeted towards the type of audience you're supposed to get. If you want to make it another warez or copyrighted content distributing site, then the style's ok, otherwise you need some stunning graphics with celebrities and movies (well, i am not talking exactly legal here...). If you really need to build a community forum with active posters, offering media isn't a good choice, but good discussion topics (and controversial topics), a fairly attractive site design, and ease of use gets it going. I know many people will disagree with me putting forth statements like "design doesn't matters in web 2.0", "simplicity rules" and so on. But that's just wrong for entertainment forums.. I have experimented well enough with it!
Yep Important thats true, successful Entertainment sites tend to entertain people from the start itself, so have a good design, thats a nice point, but don't use too heavy graphics or it might scare people away IT
I once started a forum with a local contest. Anyone who posted at least 10 quality posts could enter the contest.. This got me alot of posts and people who stayed..
Really? I wouldn't have thought things like that worked. I'm going to give it some thought and see what I can come up with. This is turning into a pretty high quality thread
Glad to see you liked my post, An Idea for a contest prize on your site in particular would be for example a new DVD or DVD box from a movie or series or a or DIVX player. You could search a sponsor for this type of contest, for example a multimedia store or a moviestore (however in your case I don't think alot of moviestores would like to sponsor your contest because of the fact that your taking some of there business ) .
Yes, but when you put up a costly item as a prize, make sure the stretch period for the contest is pretty long or else you might not get a good audience and people repeatedly coming to check whether they won or not and at the same time posting on the forums as well. IT
If the tips people are contributing end up helping me, I will be sure to help them back. But there's no point in sharing technique(s) on an open forum this popular because it will get used so much that it becomes ineffective. There's more than enough information on Digital Point to make people successful, you just have to use your judgement to pick and choose what might work for you. Find ideas & strategies and mold them to your niche, tweak them to work even better.
Well as if no one knew that matey - anywayz.. hope you get all the ideas out of everybody without contributing
Marketing techniques need to be adjusted to your particular niche, it's not something that someone can just tell you, and magically it works for all of your sites. Marketing is a very complex subject, it's not "plug and play". You need to listen to what I'm saying and drop the sarcasm if you are really looking to absorb knowledge from this thread.
For that to happen you have to contribute something dont you.. Its a nice idea btw so good luck - and i seriously am not sarcastic this time round