Yup. Make sure to get into search engines as well. One of my forums that I wasn't planning on promoting yet grew on it's own since Google, MSN, and Yahoo search engines kept displaying my forum on the first page. That was due to my optimizing my site for high SEO. However don't get discouraged if your community doesn't grow very large. It seems that only corporate sites or forums that were around since 1995 are the only ones that remain popular.
Yep. Does your forum offer something that other competing forums do not? Theres also banner advertising, article advertising, PPC, text links, press releases, and lots more you can do.
Also I've found that mod-rewrite is amazing for SEO. Especially if you implement it from the upstart.
Thanks for the replies I have worked on content a lot. Infact we are already ranking good in some of the major keyword of our site but still forum participation is close to nill. I have people comming and asking questions..at least 10 new members every week. But they dont come back again.
10 new members a week is better than nothing. Whatever you have done to achieve the 10, you should keep doing. Write more articles to attract more natural search engine traffic. How many uniques from search engines do you get a day at the moment?
I get around 700-800 unique visitors in a week...but it seems that they just read the articles and go....can you suggest me something that will make them stick a bit more and participate in our forums.
100 a day is do-able. Personally, I would work on increasing traffic before working on the forum, unless the aim of the site is to be a forum? Maybe you should add 'News' and 'articles' forum and post threads in there that will help with bringing traffic and give new visitors something to read and get interested in.
there you go...our site is a community based website. We try to provide the general people a platform (forums)...where they can post their queries and also discuss on various issues. We are into Finance Industry
Incentives... I don't stick around a forum without a reason. Content, contests, tools, socializing, whatever the reason... incentives.
Hmmm!! you have pointed out a very interesting point.....will give it a thought and try it as soon as possible..Thanks
You may want to refer to the following thread. There is some really good advice there. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=192911
make sure you have done SEO to your forum. This way, people may easily find your site from Search engine. I got pretty descent click from Google to my forums.
Get some articles written here: http://www.articlewarriors.com Then put them on your site. The search engines LOVE content.
An apache mod that changes your URLs to a more readable format. Eg Look at the URL for this page: showthread.php?p=1878925 Rewriting this to showthread.php/How-Do-I-Build-A-Community-1878925.htm Would help out a lot. And it's pretty simple to do with free forum mods that are out there (or with your own custom software)
check this more then enough for you to know how a community can be taken on top of the world http://forumrating.com/blog/2006/12/04/want-to-boost-your-forums-learn-how/
It is extremely easy to get users to your site, the hard part is getting them to stay active and post. I always thought it was weird how users would register, take a peek, then never return. The only time I register with a forum is if I want to be part of the community. The only time I leave is when there are power hungry mods and admins who abuse their power.
You probably are already doing this, but You can also make a private board, available to registered members only. In this board you can have some tool, or something useful for your "finance" community. May be some sort of industry news, if you can arrange it on time and first would be better. 10 signups from 700 visits is a very poor conversion... Try to get them registered first. Other than this, Mod rewrite as mentioned above will be useful for SEO purposes. Bye