I know this has probably been asked but I'm seeing what answers i can get. I have a site that has vbulletin and vbseo. The forums are not the main site but off a /forums. I have a store (*******.com) and the forums (********.com/forums). I have had the store up for about 2 years and the forums up for about a year and a half. The forums have Members: 1,485. Is this alright for this time period? The only investment i have made with the forums is vbseo. I don't think it has helped that much :-/ I was wondering what is the best software/ alternative of some sort to get members. I don't understand why the members aren't coming in August 17, 2007 1 August 19, 2007 5 August 20, 2007 4 August 21, 2007 3 August 22, 2007 1 August 26, 2007 5 August 27, 2007 3 August 28, 2007 1 August 29, 2007 2 August 30, 2007 2 August 31, 2007 1 September 02, 2007 1 September 05, 2007 1 September 09, 2007 1 September 12, 2007 2 September 13, 2007 1 September 15, 2007 3 September 16, 2007 3 September 17, 2007 2 September 18, 2007 1 September 19, 2007 1 September 22, 2007 2 September 23, 2007 1 September 24, 2007 1 September 27, 2007 1 September 30, 2007 2 October 01, 2007 3 October 02, 2007 1 October 03, 2007 1 October 04, 2007 2 Those are the registration statistics. Help please????
You should advertise the forum to users going to your ecommerce site, during checkout. Also advertise elsewhere just for the forum by itself, and offer some free gift or a percentage off in your ecommerce store to persons who register for the forum. This will create a lot of revenue for you, because even if you lose a little money in offering the gift or percentage off, you gain more people that you can automate emails to, such as weekly deals on the ecommerce site, or coupons for the ecommerce site. If you signup for a site like newegg you will see what I am talking about. I don't always pay attention to their emails, but I don't unsubscribe either. I tend to disregard them unless they have a good deal or some product that I'm interested in. This will increase both forum registrations and traffic to your ecommerce site.
That is basically it. Just try it out and monitor to see if things improve. Chances are they will. Keep tweaking the methods, until you start seeing improvements. Then let it ride a while like that. You may want to consider using yoursqueezepage.com type technology. It will monitor your opt in page for you. You build the opt in page with their site, and every element is monitored. You can created multiple headers, copy, etc. and it will use the combination of the best elements that gets you the highest amount of signups. In the end, to get signups and drive traffic, you have to fill a need for the customer. Why do you yourself give your email and name, or go to a forum, blog, etc? Use that same mentality when trying to draw in customers by filling their needs. Utilize different domains that variations on your primary domain to test different marketing strategies. Big retailers do this when trying to appeal to different demographics.
Yoursqueezepage will let you test the effectiveness of your opt in pages. It basically allows you to create different headers, different graphics, different opt in forms, etc. These create variations of a single opt in page. It als integrates well with aweber. It will run the opt in page and keep changing the different elements such as the graphics, header, etc. until you have the optimally successful opt in page.