Technical Forum

I am a fairly successful webmaster and SEO, but success with my forums is eluding me.

I would really appreciate hearing some suggesstions from successful forum administrators as to what could be missing from The Tech FAQ Forum which is causing it to constantly fail to achieve critical mass.

I've used paid posting, cajoling friends into posting, and posting from multiple accounts. I've sent newsletters. I recently upgraded to vBulletin and vBSEO. I've re-skinned and re-organized and I can't help but feel that I'm missing that special something.

Wait, it's not a special something -- it's forum members! That's what I'm missing.

Something about this forum seems to drive people away, en masse.

I think that what I need is some serious mentoring from someone who has built several successful online communities in the past. That may be asking for too much.

What do you think?

 

I'm not sure SEO would totally fix your problem, albeit is a problem with your site. It is tough finding a a good audience to particiapte. Maybe your audience type is the kind of know it all that only posts to usenet or thorugh IRC channels. hehe... who knows. Maybe you can add some kind of technical blog that talks about differnt subject going on in the forum.

 

I think you have to ask what would make them come to your site rather than the usual big PC tech support forums to ask their question?

 

Thanks everyone for your input and ideas so far. Please keep 'em coming!

I have not run contests on this forum yet, because I don't have enough of a member base yet. There would be only one contestant.

The forum was getting good SE traffic when it was phpBB. The new vBulletin/vBSEO pages have not ranked yet. I don't try to rank with the forum name or the categories or forums. I do try to rank for the titles of the individual threads. Often, I will do keyword research and start message threads on good terms that I have found.

Instead of a seperate blog, I make blog-style posts directly into the forum. The main web site to which this forum is attached also have over a thousand pages of unique content, and I use that to try to lure people into the forums.

One key differentiator which sets this forum aside from the PC forums is that we also discuss much more technical topics, such as networking, VoIP, telephony and satellite. But really, those other "big PC tech support forums" have the members that I want and I'm going to have to figure out how to compete with them. I don't want all of the posters (yet), but I would like to carve out a share of that market. To date, I have been unsuccessful. That's why I posted this thread.

 

how about you did get some new folders designed, so its more a unique design?

 

Forums are hard to get going, you need some good technical members to answers others questions or it might not do so well. Try getting link exchanges with some other tech sites.

 

Website is nice.PR is very good.You should try to add some more functionality like a uCash points, people post and have some bonueses, like access to hidden forums or smth like that.

 

Well i would suggest you to start a cool contest on your forum ( you can start anything ...like for quality and quantity posting etc )

Advertise your contest on all the big forums ! Like DP , Site Point , etc ... !

Do not keep one single winner .... keep atleast top 5 winner runners up and one winner ( may be you can pay or gift the runners up a bit less ) ..

You can either give Money in Prizes or you can also think of giving TLDs.

 

Nice forum Will - I have just joined

I found that people are always looking for tech forums for help, most of all those who work in call centres.

What I did notice on your forum is that when in a topic forum you need to look for the menu to browse other topics - i.e. the menu for The Tech FAQ Forum > Technical - it just seems to be too high up on the page......not sure if thats a real issue though.

 

Thanks to everyone for their feedback and guidance!

I started a contest with an iPod as a prize. If this works well, I will run a stream of similar contests.

And thanks especially to dhruvd and turfsniffer for joining the forum!

I'm thinking about a way to build a menu in a left skyscraper to list the forums and sub-forums.

 

Sir my suggestion to you > Do advertise this forum contest as much as possible for more traffic and contestants. ( Try advertising this on other big forum sites too)

 

This forum is bothering me with a very strange concern. I can't define what my concern is well enough to describe it clearly. Roughly, my concern is that the "feel" of the posts on the forum are discouraging new members from posting.

The forum gets a reasonable amount of search engine traffic, but that traffic does not seem to be converting well to member registrations, new threads, and new posts. (other than contest related posts)

I am worried that something about the forum content is scaring people off.

Does this make any sense?

 

From what I am seeing you have a lot of open threads with not very many replies in them.

When I browse into a forum the first thing I look at is the post count of a thread too see how busy it is, the more busy the more info to stew over.

Maybe look at the threads with the most reads and try and drum up more discussion with the current members to build the post count. For example take the IBM 600 thread on codes - you have over 5,000 reads with only 8 replies, maybe if that thread got a bigger post count there is a higher chance people will find it from the serps and start joining in if they see plenty of activity.

Just made a short visit over there, will try and get back soon

 

My #1 concern is that I have to use the botton scrollbar to see the whole page. That alone would turn me away personally.

My suggestion would be to make the forum active through as many means possible, then drive the traffic.

 

Hmm I can see alot of threads with a few pages of posts.

How is your competition going?

I dont think the feel of the posts have a problem, looks pretty normal to me!

 

The low message count thread observation is a very interesting one. Mentally, my model thread has been three posts long: question, answer, confirmation. That's not a good model for community building.

The horizontal scrolling issue is fixed. It was an error on my part with two elements that just did not work together at 1024x768 and below.

The competition is going reasonably well. Post quality could be a lot higher, but when is that not the case? dhruvd was right that I should have promoted the contest more widely. There are only a few contestants.

 

I've not read all of the posts, so I apologise if this has already been mentioned.

The first thing that hit me was the logo - okay, this shouldn't drive people away, and it has loads of content, regularly updated, but I think it would be more attractive if you had more unique logo.

The thing with this type of forum, is that you would only visit it, if you had a problem with your PC or a technical problem. It's not the type of community, where you would see regulars (I don't think)

I also found the Google ads to be a little intrusive, especially the line of Google Ads near the navigation at the top - it actually made me stop and think where I should click to go back to the main part of the forum.

The content links - also annoyed me when I accidently hovered over the green links. Just some initial thoughts - I've added it to my favs incase I ever have any PC problems though!

 

All you have to do is wait bro. Forums dont get popular so soon. Just keep it under your eye and chill.

 

Ahh... patience... not one of my strong suits.

The forum is doing better, thanks to people here and people elsewhere who have joined and are posting questions. There are now several new threads a day, which at least makes the place look occupied.

Soon I will need to recruit forum members to answer questions.

Our contest was somewhat successful. We will have another one soon.

Thanks everyone for all of your imput, suggesstions, and posts!