I own www.politiciansarescum.com and if you go to it I have 8 members (at the current time). Well, if you go to the bottom, it says the most users online was 105. This shocked me. I went to Awstats and it says on September 11, I had 440 unique visitors and 1700 page hits whereas, I usually only have about 20. Yet, with all these visitors, no one signed up. Can anyone tell me how this happened? Screen shot of Awstats: http://www.upanimage.com/images/jsqopp17jfae9fptq8fh.jpg
Do you know how those visitors came? If it was a social bookmarking site like StumbleUpon, those users tend to stay for a little bit if they don't like what they see. I would try and "inflate" your posts so that your forum looks busy. Buy the forum posts or create them yourself. People love to see busy forums. Good luck!
What I do is about every day or two, I go and I post in every single topic. But I'm not sure if this is the right thing because all that people will be seeing is "last post by Kyle" and I don't think that they see that as a busy forum.
The day with 440 visitors, if you look at the number of page views to hits you will see that the ratio of hits to page views is totally different to other days. Usually that just means it is several search engines that Awstats does not recognise as search engines. MSN have several bots that Awstats does not recognise as bots therefore show under page views etc as does yahoo, both operating on multiple IP's, plus there are many "test" search bots out there. I see the same thing in Awstats often. You could try to answer your own posts using a different username until the forum starts to get more posts
I think you may get visitors from stumbleupon. If you receive the same amount of visitors tomorrow alos, you can become as a proud member of this blogosphere...
On the 11th I got 440 UV. Yesterday I got 24. Today, SO FAR, I've gotten 30. Anything you can infer from this?
None of them signed up probably because it was not targeted traffic. Example your forum deals with Politicians. If you get someone looking for music, or videos why would they sign up? I would start tracking your stats and find out where your traffic is coming from. Have you installed Google Analytics on your site yet? If not I recommend you do.
September 11..wonder how many visitors found your site from this article while doing a 9/11 related search
If it was targeted to the 9/11 search phrase surely he would have gotten more signed up. It sounds like a few search engines speeding your site. You can check some stats with 3rd party apps, do you use google analytics?
I also agree you really need to make it look more busy and then you will convert more into real users keep the forum posters on for about a year build build build then it will be busy enough to run on its own.
Hopefully, but for now, I'm going for small goals like 50 members. Then 100. And so on. I just signed up for Google Analytics today Thanks. It took me long enough to think of it after watching all those speeches and conventions. Thanks! If you'd like, please stick around and keep on posting there because we need all the help we can get to get the site going.
it might have something to do with the upcoming elections and media coverage the campaigns are getting I had an article about the olympics get allot of traffic one day and very little the next it just works like that sometimes
Well my traffic is getting alot better. I went 10-15 visitors a day to 440 in one day, then 24, then 50, then 75 (so far)
Might be worth getting some paid forum posts - people will be more intersted if there is plenty of content