Hello everyone, I need some advice with for my forum Blogcrowds.com. I have a steady source of people (around 20/day with 1 or 2 being spammers) who register as there are some incentives resources that only members may access. However the problem is I'm not getting as many posts as I think I should. My post/member ratio is horrible like 449/374 and I have over 100 post... I tried to stay active and I'm looking into paid posting, is there anything else that would help me? Thanks
I can see one problem, and that is the date of the last post in some of the sections. Many of them have not had a post in a month or more...and the bottom two (ironically enough the ones right above your stats) haven't had a post in 5 months. You should consolidate some of these sections, because it makes your forum look a lot slower than it actually is. It's not just the timestamp of the last post, but also all of the single digit counts for Threads/Posts. When a member sees that a section has just 1 or 2 threads with 5-10 replies, they think that there is nobody there to talk to. Aside from that, are you doing a lot of posting yourself? If not, you need to be the first one in there to initiate discussion...You can't rely on your members to do this when things are slow. Lead by example
Thanks for the tips, I think I will hide the forums at the bottom till I have more of a user base. Mean while, I'll post more...
I don't know why I have a forum. It's the most difficult section of a site to promote, and it involves alot of posting, daily, making the forum appear busy, rather than dead. I've earnt very little from the forum. Blogs are much more enjoyable to promote and easier too.
Really? Ive got a new forum that Im trying to get going. I signed up for a blog at Blogger.com but Ive never used it. I guess I dont feel like I have enough to say to keep it going.
Yes I agree its very hard to promote, but I think once your forum reach a certain size it will grow by itself. As for making money from the forum, its probably easier to work with CPC on blogs since most forum member don't click on ads, but with strategic tweaking it could happen. A forum will generate a lot more pageviews/visit than a blog so it is much more profitable in terms of CPM
I used to have the same problem. Imagine you have a listing of RPGMaker games, one thing you might do is get the name/genre of the game and then search your forum database for topics which might be of interest for users viewing the listing. Generally the more integrated your site is with your forum, the more likely a person is to post.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean? With your exmaple of RPG games do you mean create a list of name/genre of the game for everyone to see? How did you solve this problem?
There's a few articles over at vBShack in the article subforums which could possibly be of assistance to you. http://www.vbshack.net/forum/lights-camera-users-t24/index.html Hope that helps.