Oy... So my first forum that I built in late 2004 now has over 4,000 members and about 1,000 uniques/10,000 pageviews a day.. it's doing fine.. My new forum, a technology gadget based forum, is off to a VERY slow start.. I can't seem to get it going. I am willing to spend money to advertise it, and I have been.. my AdWords campaign is not working out too well, and AdBrite is so-so as well... ANY suggestions, ideas, etc... would be MUCH appreciated.. the site is 2 months old and thus has little to NONE natural search rankings.. I need help, and I am not ashamed to ask... anyone??? Serg
I have not done that in the past.. I am open to any and all suggestions. The costs of putting an ad in a tech magazine are staggering! I don't think I will get much of a return on my investment... if I advertise in a Gadget mag, it will most likely be around $1000-2500 for one month, and that will be for a small ad... you think it might be worth it?
It depends? Do you think it is worth it (how much will you make in the long run?). WIll you be able to replace the money after you get all those hits, and etc.
Well I don't mind spending some cash, not at all... I just want to make the most effective use of my funds...
How about one of those local free magazines at the grocery store as you're walking out? You know the free ones that advertise real estate and apartments? I know most communities I have resided in have had "computer shopper" types of local magazines ... you could then have some sort of contest when others refer their friends to post, you could keep track and give the winner with the most posts or referrals a free thumb drive or an ipod shuffle
I don't know, I don't think real-world advertising compares to the Web the same way. I pay 80-odd dollars / week for a small ad goes out to roughly 200k households, I get maybe a dozen calls from it (not to the website, it's for a service I do)... With that in mind, I would say you pay anywhere from 5 - 20 dollars / visitor. I could be wrong, but I really think it's going to be way more expensive per click (so to speak) to do it that way. I feel you though, there sure seems to be one awful traffic shortage going on.
Wow. I had a similar experience. I built one site back in March 2005, and worked very hard to gain 2000 members. I built a new site in December 2005. I spent $400 in its opening weekend on Adwords & Yahoo. I saw hundreds of visitors, and gained... 10 members. What a terrible return on my investment! I spent a month making provocative posts to my forums and heard... the chirping of crickets. I finally came to the conclusion that I've been outclassed by 2 big competitors. I didn't even know one of them existed until after I started my site. Both have been around for a few months longer, their installed user base is bigger, and their content is more meaty. I've mostly abandoned my forum, and I'm looking to re-tool the site. I want to offer something the other sites don't have, and I have a few ideas of what that might be. In the meantime, I've decided to accept that my site will be a ghosttown for a few months while I rethink it. I think my biggest mistakes were as follows. First, I put up a forum, a blog, and an Amazon affiliate store, all in their defaults. No customization (well, some mods, but I mean, no cohesive, unique design). The site looked dull. Second mistake is that I just hadn't built up a lot of content, so visitors didn't have much to do. Of course, I expected they would be all over the forum, but that was naive. Third mistake was that I didn't really have anything unique -- other sites offer forums, so why come to mine? I needed something to attract visitors. I've already started to fix the first problem. I found an affordable artist on guru.com, and he's delivered some artwork to help give the site a unique look & feel. And I've got the third problem maybe covered -- I have an idea for something unique that others haven't done in my market segment. And it will involve generating some SEO-friendly content (by coincidence, not by design), which also helps with the paucity-of-content problem. However, my unique idea won't add tons of content, just some. We'll have to see how it goes. I wish you luck with your site. Maybe something in my post might help you to pinpoint an issue or a fix that might be relevant to your site. -Tony
Thanks... Actually when I started my first forum, there were a number of other forums on the same exact topic that had over 3,000 members. Most laughed at me and told me "good luck"... well in the end I ended up beating out almost all of them to have one of the most popular forums in the field. What I am saying is that, it can be done if you want to...
I've never done this myself, but I've heard good things about paying people to post in order to get a forum rolling (if low post activity is a problem). You can go to someone place like the SitePoint contests forum and post a contest where whoever makes the post on-topic posts in, say, a month gets $100-$200 or something. There's also a review of posting services here: http://www.websitepublisher.net/article/pay-for-posts
I used Forum Elves & Forum Launch. Forum Elves never followed through. Forum Launch posts were mostly 1-liners. I suppose if you want to fill your forum with single-sentence posts like "what's that all about" and "haha that was funny" then yeah, it's a good deal. Maybe there are better ones out there, but since Forum Launch started it all, I expected them to be top-of-the-game. I also did a post-trade. That was even worse. I posted 10 mid-size, high-quality posts to a certain forum. In exchange, he posted 5 1-liners, and 5 longer posts that were all plagarized. I have to admit, I was open to the idea in the past. I've felt that hiring/exchanging was much better than creating sock puppets, for example. But having tried it out now, I'd have to say I'd rather leave the forum empty than pollute it. But that's just me. Others certainly may have had better experiences. -Tony
Im not very good in running forum. But to me, the best way to expand forum is to provide good discussions and other interesting topics. Why not try create some nice topic discussions and then advertise your site on other forums.
Sounds like you need exposer. The suggestions already listed should deffinatley help you. Have you considered Million Pixel Page advertising. These sites are getting alot of attention. Articles are popping up all over telling there success rates. Choose wisely, for some have much better long term marketing plans than others. It is something to look into considering the buzz these sites have created. Hope this helps..
You could try submitting articles about certain gadgets and related topics and then including a link at the end of the article to a specific thread or forum section where the reader can discuss the article with other readers. If this fails at least you will have got some links from it......
Hello Serg, I'm assuming it is indexed in the major search engines ok and you have links from your busy forum to the new one? If not, that would be a good place to start. You can also advertise it for free through my traffic exchange at http://www.freetrafficbar.com. You can trade ad/banner space on your busy site to get you advertising for your slower site. With my exchange, you can put in the banner code on your site and generate ad credits every time a banner is shown.
I’ll give some free advice. I read lot of forums and there are a few things that bug me. First use nice colors. Don’t use dark colors that make the site look creepy and hard to read. Don’t leave the forum as is, configure it to look unique. Give freedom to readers and to members. These are just a few things that make me not like a forum.
Yo serg man, how ya doin.. I think you advertise on technology related sites and forums(there are hundreds of techie forums). Get some moderators who can help you in promoting the site. And be UNIQUE..give something which others can't. And seriously, I think you should keep all the subforums of Nokia section in only one section. I mean having a subforum for 6680,6630 and others don't make any sense..keep one forum for all Nokia handsets.