2 year old site, community built, what now?

I own a site about a topic that I'm very passionate about. We get ~8,000 uniques per month, ~60,000 pageviews, and we make a little profit as it stands, maybe ~$0.03/day from AdSense, and $14/mo from TLA. Our index is PR4, and a few of our other pages are PR3 and below.

So, the question stands. What now? I want to grow the community even FURTHER. Money isn't an issue, really. As long as it pays for itself. I'm interested in making the place POPULAR, first and foremost.

You can use dnScoop to evaluate my site and its worth.
RolePlay Gateway Popularity

 

One thing you can do it think of items that your members will be interested in buying or need to buy all the time. The sign up for affiliate programs that sell those items and post it to your members.

Maybe create a section of ths site and call it member deals.

 

try to avoid downtime (upgrading the server) in the middle of the day.

as for growing the community, perhaps you should actively recruit valued users from other communities that can add to your site. it also helps to have an angle that other forum based communities dont have. maybe build some long threads with tons of useful info to the RPG community at large and then spread the link to the thread around.

 

Monotize... figure out a good way to do this and you will be able to grow your community even faster than you ever imagined.

 

Do SEO work on your forum.
First and foremost, make it easier to be indexed. My newer and smaller forum has 1800+ pages indexed, yours has 52.

Once that's done remove your site's name from your title tag for all forum threads. For example, I went to a thread titled Pokemon World Characters, but the title tag reads RolePlay Gateway Yadda Yadda Yadda Pokemon... Search engines hate that.

As far as monetizing, it depends how much you're willing to sacrafice your look. Putting adsense at the top of each page as either a leaderboard or large rectangle and below the first post will greatly improve your profit if and when you choose to do that. Possibly a better option is to put adsense for guests only, so all those google hits you'll get after you take my advice will bring you profit without upsetting the community you already built.

 

try with some affiliates on your forum

good luck

 

Google Analytics shows this as our slowest time, that's why it was chosen.

I'm not sure where you got your stats from? That's weird - Google's showing 22,900 indexed pages.

Thanks for the SEO tip, though! Should it be all pages, or just the viewtopic pages... or what?

NYDAz, where would you suggest I start looking for affiliates?

 

You need to decide first how you want to pay the affiliates. Will it be for each new signup, post, click, sale, etc...

Once you have that you can beging to put together a strategy for creating and running the affiiate program.

 

if you need growing no. of members, you should extent the sections of the forums as well. more sections mean more people who interested in those will come. and existing memebr got more choice to participate. ^^

 

id be careful about adding too many sections too fast, it can dilute the viewership per section and no one wants to post in a section that only has 8 posts. if a new section is need and can support itself, then go for it, otherwise continue to incubate.

 

CPM ads can return you more than Google Adsense returns. This is what happened for me with a similar traffic to yours.

 

casperl, thanks for the tip, what CPM ad program do you recommend?

We did grow to fast early on, that was one of the mistakes we made. We're always in the process of refining our forum list, mostly merging older and unused forums. The same applies in reverse, when there's a bunch of activity in one forum, but it appears that there is also a lot of discussion about particular topic, we split that activity off into a subforum.

Great tips guys, thanks to everyone who has replied so far! Keep 'em coming!

 

I am using TribalFusion and it returns more than adsense income. So i am happy about it although i will try to hire same space to bigger companies in my niche later.

 

Thanks again!

Keep them coming! I just migrated over to a new domain, www.roleplaygateway.com, and I've got the entire old domain 301'd to the new. What about some more SEO tips?

Forum URLs, should I use robots.txt to restrict access to showpost links? Should I use .htaccess to rewrite URLs?

 

Hate to double post, but I'm definitely enjoying what everyone has given so far, and I'm looking for more. Keep posting!

 

How do you do that?

 

may be what you need is just some more traffic !

 

JoyGoRound - I edited my phpBB template to include the site title and description, as well as the page title. I've since removed this, but I'm not sure if I should or not. Is keyword stuffing really a problem? Do I want to focuse on a few keywords, or do I let the user-generated content be pretty lonesome up there in the title?

adv4all - how would you recommend I go about getting more traffic?

 

You want user generated content to be in the title. Look at DP!

My, much smaller and newer, forum gets hits from over 100 different search terms daily. There's no reason that if you do similiar SEO that you shouldn't top that easy.

 

Hrm, good point. Thanks for the tip, rep added (that was easy, lol.)

Anyone else have any suggestions?