I have a website on how to care for lizards do you think adding forums is a good idea to incress page veiws?
im not sure how many lizard lovers are there on this planet, no offence but you have selected a topic which would have very few visitors , and its gonna be very very hard for you to get members, try taking a survey how many love lizards here :O
sure that more choice of features will increse the number of visitors. having a community for a small group of people that have the same interest sure will boost your site page views. I would say yes it's a good idea.
a lot of people miss the point about websites and what makes them successful. I think starting a forum on something as a small a market as "lizzards" would be a great idea. Espically as you might be the ONLY forums out there for lizzard owners? Pierce
i think it will help you to increase your page view but i'm sure getting the first 1000 posts will be very difficult for you
You'd be very surprised ... http://www.reptileforums.com = 20k members http://www.reptileforums.co.uk/ = 5k members And I am sure there are many others. I'd go for it, but beware of the software you use. phpbb for example will quickly get filled up with spambots ... try SMF if you want something free.
In a word, YES! Indexed forum posts can bring in all kinds of traffic for those looking for information. Encourage questions by newbies, as it'll likely be newibies that will be googling questions Encourage FAQW writing by members as well... in fact, hold article writing competitions and offer forum perks as prizes. I'd not bother with ads though, as those generally get ignored (forum users are infamous for giving a low CTR). To help get your new forum off the ground, I suggest using other forums for promotion. If you set up your article section, then you can use those articles to start discussions in other forum. Use Copyright laws to your advantage and quote 10-15% of your article then link back to your page for the rest of it. (I give other tips here). Best of luck, and if you start a new forum, lemme know. I may be getting a Water Dragon this summer...
Adding forums would be a great idea, mainly because they are an easy way to generate lots and lots of extra content. More content equals more potential page views.
If the forum is laid out in such a way that is easy to navigate and your discussions on there are intelligent it will definitely help your site grow. Plus if you already have an established site this will help you with user registrations.
I have a large forum for a classic rock band kansasfans.com I get tons of pageviews, but I do not sell much. The same 2400 people visit the site and they don't click on adds or buy much. I think it may depend on your audience.
just ensure that every time you have a writeup or article you have the link to the forum discussion at the end of it. and think the forum categories and sub cats carefully i found this to be one of the most difficult parts of creating a forum
I think it would be great to add forum. Technically, your forum will be based on web 2.0 technology where webmaster has less work to do on content and more on administration side. Let the forum users take care of content more the content = frequent spiders + more visitors + $$
wow chemero, YES... 20K members and an alexa of 1,300,000 .. which means 10 visitors per day... woohoo! now there's a boat load of money in there huh? a boat load. listen to these people are you will dive in the same alexa dept as that reptile forum.
Forums are GREAT for pageviews and there are TONES of lizard loves out there. Think about it. I know a few but like even if you know NONE who cares? Your putting it on the net. THERE ARE LOTS TRUST ME. Good niche. Good luck.
Instead of a forum, you could run an old style message board that doesn't require registration, but with a catchpa. That way you don't need a large dedicated group of users to keep the message board active.
why don't you try a blog, after all blogs gives the most hits! remember forums will work nice, but then you need to get some traffic, no one joins an inactive forum! and lizards are no easy topic
Possible words that could make it or break it, and certainly a thought to ponder. Starting a forum without some backing may flop. Maybe join other [related] forums, establish yourself, then recruit from your list of friends. People are also more willing to join an attractive forum. I'd personally go with one of the bigger platforms (I like vBulletin) and then pay the extra $30 or so to get a paid theme, or better, pay the $50 or so and get a custom one with pretty lizards and such. Once you have a pretty forum, you can then pull in some key members. Do NOT offer moderatorship to just anyone. Set up special custom groups and put them in there... you'll regret promoting jerks to staff otherwise. When I started my forum, I petitioned friends from other forums for $50+ each for "founder" status which got them a pretty colored name and access to the mod board (but NOT mod status). They paid for the theme, the vB license (paid), and for hosting... it was also help from them that pulled in over 100 members via the referral program. I'm just the Admin, and the only thing I've given has been time