Sorry seems to be rude. How much hour you spend per day to promote your forum? and how many people in your facebook groups, how many web directories you submit and did you write any articles for your forums? choosing keywords are important in the first place, but if you did little promotion then you will have little traffic.
I have spent on average 1 - 2 hours per day submitting to forums, directories, etc etc for the past 6 months. And it is still ongoing
Any more ideas out there? What sort of traffic stats should one be averaging after 6 months starting from scratch with no previous knowledge? Please dont say 'it depends on niche' im aware of that but just looking for your own experiences
Text is history; the video and, better, audio-visual is the next step. So go to YouTube and post your videos there. Of course, you would want to put the URL of your website in the description area...
Text is history?? So why didnt you post that message in video format then? My site allows for members to post and share galleries of photo's, but no video allowance as yet. People will always type on the Internet, unless its in a skype type scenario. But forums will be around for a long long time due to the fact it doesnt have to be live, and who is going to watch videos of people saying one or 2 sentences?
Right now you're spending all of your time pushing people to your site, when you could be spending that time building a site that pulls people in. I would take a break from marketing and focus on your site. All I see are ads, what looks like a bunch of syndicated posts from one user on the homepage, and apparently it's unfinished because there's some text under the login that says "test writing". Let's see... I'm looking for something to read, but the only other links I see are a bunch of sponsored hotel links. When I do select a forum/post I can't get back to the default homepage anymore, it takes me to the forum index instead, which is actually an improvement because the forums are listed there. Honestly I'm not just trying to bash on your site. But unless you plan on getting a lot more serious about developing good content, a stronger identity, and improving the overall user experience dramatically you will never get past a trickle of visitors no matter how much you promote. The first thing I'd do is: Unless you're making some OK money on the ads, remove all of them until you have enough visitors to justify the negative impact they're currently having on your identity and stickiness. Ditch vBAdvanced, or get it set up properly so navigation isn't a nightmare. Create an articles section and get to work. At this stage your time is better spent developing the site than slogging through time-consuming shoestring marketing. Find the top 5 sites directly related to your niche that you can promote in some way on (commenting on a popular blog, participating in a busy community, etc), and forget about the rest for now. Any advertising you continue to do, keep it relevant. Best of luck with everything and don't give up! ** Oh, and one final critical piece of advice - get a mailing list set up, and offer some kind of freebie for signups - say a freebie travel guide, eBook or access to exclusive video/content
Open a youtube channel, visit vacation places in Australia, make some videos about those place and post them on youtube. This could include everything from places to eat, to beaches and scuba diving locations.
Man Youtube works great for me. Of course SEO link bulilding is always best, but make some youtube movies relavient to your website and slap them on youtube. Another good thing is syndication, a lot of movie sites use youtubes video, nice little flow of traffic. Some of my youtube videos have sent thousands of hits to my site. My highest viewed video had 48,000 hits.. so yeah youtube is a good promo source
The main problem I see is you don't have the forum categories on the homepage. That alone would make me move on to another forum. The Ad's look fine. Seems to be a lot of white space on the forum. My forum which is in a challenging niche is getting 171 visits a day. Last month I got 3749 uniques and 5667 total visits. Site is a year old. Try giving something travel related away to new member signups. Good Luck
Many thanks to Tekime and KJH. I am now trying to figure out a way to integrate the forums as opposed to the threads into vBAdvanced. Will let you know when i have got it working And i agree with Tek, i need to focus more on pulling people in, than pushing it to them, im just not 100% sure how to do this
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I have now implemented some of Tekime's suggestions (thanks for the helpful feedback). 1. Got rid of the 'test writing' that was appearing 2. Created a list of the forums, as well as the threads 3. Submitted articles to more websites I have left the ads, as they go some way to covering my hosting, even with my low traffic. Any more constructive ideas welcome
I've been to this situation before with just a bit difference in time.I did things like you have said but still not getting the traffic for my site until i found out link building as SEO.
I dont think its link building that is my problem. I already have PR2 after 6 months, and have heaps of links all over the place
Would you/have you done any PPC with this at all? this could help build rep for the site and get some visitors coming past.
I think one thing is to give the users more when they arrive. There is nothing on the main page telling me why I want to stay there, or more importantly why I NEED to stay there and make an acct, post, etc. You've got the link building down, now give them something to sink their teeth into when they get there! Integrate the banner into the header of the site so it looks complete. There is so much you can do with vb/vba to make something look complete and integrated that I think you're leaving a lot on the table that can be used to your advantage.
You can also do Social Bookmarking and Articel Submissions i think they help you to incress ur site traffic.
Thanks for the advice. I really appreciate constructive criticism like this, as this is my first site, so i have a lot to learn. I have implemented some of the changes you suggested, and am looking into a new logo or something along those lines