Well in my experience as a admin of a bodybuilding site for little over a year now, I'm trying to figure the route to the best development of active members. Over 2,000 registered members in the past year but only about 170 of them stay active daily on average. We were peaking 220's average a day for a while, but since have slowed down to around 170. We've also installed visitor-rich features, shoutbox amoung other things ... but what really attracts people to stay? My traffic is completely by word of mouth, no real search engine submission or link-building has ever been done up until the last few days when I've started to really press this issue. Our advertisers are not adsense based, rather banners from retailers and product manufacturers. Anyone had similar experiences or advice?
Yeah approx. $7000 a year from banner advertisements, non-adsense related and advertising is all within us -- they contact us, we place ads. My main goal is to bump traffic up another 1000-1500 uniques per day (where we're at about 700 a day right now) and get 2000+ uniques a day, which is feasable IMO.
I'm actually big into bodybuilding. Mind if I ask what site you are talking about? I usually only browse bodybuilding.com atm.
www.IronMass.com ... If you're a long-time reader of BB.com's Forums, you'll notice most of the people here are the people who don't post at BB.com. More specific, all the "old school" members who were around at the first forum. Including myself, same username at about every site I visit, I was active on BB.com for about a year before they screwed a lot of long-time members and we all kinda "migrated" to my site. We're actually developing another site/newsprint based around this idea here, not a mailout, but it will be a free newsprint. My main goal here, I guess, is to bring "newbies" in the bodybuilding/health world to my site and ask questions ... to have the veteran members reply, sparking more questions. Domino effect of posts.
Yea dude I mean I've been a member of BB.com forums for 3 years so I've def seen it grow a crapload. I signed up on your forums as "glutes" and posted a pic of myself as my first post. GL with everything.
That's really not bad, no forum will get a very large percentage of members online each day. Word of mouth can be very effective for forums. I have 12,000 members without doing much real advertising, mostly due to word of mouth. (I doubt more than 300 are are online each day though, which is why I say 170/2000 sounds good.) no real search engine submission If you have a large number of threads, you can get a lot of traffic from people stumbling across them in google searches. Are your threads in google? Do the page titles have the thread names in them, do the urls have the thread titles in them (this helps match keywords better)?
You really need to find other forums, places with similar topics and exchange links, or join up and post with your forum in the sig.
On my forums I run raffles and competitions and things like that and send out monthly emails etc etc to keep the idea of my forums fresh in my users minds. My forums has about 5,000 members but only 200 - 300 would turn up on a regular basis. I personally don't think your numbers of attendence are terrible, maybe if you try to work on building the size of the forums it might encourage more members to come back. I personally found that people hung around a lot more when the community is more active, so I think the biggest battle is getting more members, and with getting more members you will find a higher ratio of people will hang around. That's just my spin on it. Good Luck.
one of the main problems i had with my forum, was that people werent signing up, i had many many views for each thread, but no one wanted to contribute. i made a rather intrusive register button below the header, but that also didnt work.
Work on the promotion of your site! Make your content login restricted ! Get more backlinks to your site! Try some competition and offer maybe an Ipod or some body building equipent for the users !! And people will got crazy n stuff and start coming and posting on your forums ! Coz while in the forum business, Interaction with the users matters a lot! Abhishek
I've just installed vBSEO, vBGoogle Sitemap and PRAY!!! for my Analytics account to come. I've also hired smoeone to submit me to directories to build some backlinks, and have intentions of doing as much more SEO things that are pretty simple to build into a vBulletin style template. We've run probally a dozen contests over the past year, and we run one "mega-contest" that is a online bodybuilding competition pretty much. All this seems to spark interest, but leads to little prolonged activity I've also implimented the welcome header ... seems to REALLY have helped actually, now to mod it ... I'll be getting 300 members a day! I really think it's helped though, we've gone to 7-8 registers a day as compared to the old 3-4 daily natural registers, contest times we've seen 50 a day!!! Short periods but I'd love 50 a day for a solid week or two!
One thing I do want to note about a forum ... FIND A NICHE! If you can do this, and you're somewhat "known" around the subject (even other larger boards around the same topic, if you have a strong backing of acquantances and followers ... you can get pretty high quality traffic to start the site off pretty easily).
I don't know, but the general consensus that I'm hearing is that vBSEO won't exactly work wonders for your site's SE rankings. vB is naturally a fairly good BB software when it comes to the search engines so I don't know if this will be the miracle that many make it out to be. As for the Google Analytics, well I have been waiting well over a month now will no activation code, and I have been told people have been waiting up to and over 3 months for theirs, so don't expect it any time soon. Though the back link development always helps. Contests are never going to "keep" members. What I do is make my competitions have requirements of entry like a minimum of 10 posts, and I also make the contest go over awhile, two weeks or so, and I general make it so that the winner has to claim the prize on the forums, meaning they have to post when they are announced the winner. This makes sure the prize generally goes to someone active. I also send out lots of emails during this period and I often link contests in close succession with each other so that for a 2 month period there isn't much more than a week or two when there isn't a contest running this tends to make sure that those that have just joined keep coming back to renter the new contest each time and hopefully in doing that they develop a habit of coming back to the site. But at the end of the day I don't expect most people that sign up to enter the contest to stay, if I retain 20% I'm happy. My forums went from 5 - 10 new members a day, to 30 - 50 a day on average essentially with a welcome message. It definitely gets a better sign up rate when you make registering an account a prominent feature of the welcome message.