Hey, Well a while back i started on a webmaster forum (link in sig)... Anyway i started off by offering free stuff and occasionally money to posters. This has worked great at boosting the forum, and a few cases got a few long term members. My posts are starting to slow to only a few posts per day now... Thats why i am here to ask for your help. What should i do next? An adwords campaign? Anyone know how sucessful these are converting to members? Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated... Once again thanks for your time. - Sam
I noticed adwords is very good for advertising products and other things but normally not membership sites, forums, etc. ( of course if you have a membership fee lol ) So I wouldnt recommend this unless you have a very large budget. I would suggest keep submitting your links and posting alot in your own forum. I think just like any other site you want to make your forum different from all the other hundreds or thousands of webmaster forums. So think of an idea and do it lol.
Don't waste your AdWords budget if you don't have something truly valuable on the forum. The best way to get a webmaster forum going is to develop unique tools which will keep people coming back.
too much of the space on your forum to the new visitor does not show content. I would get rid of the text which says And also relocate the login, so that it does not take extra space. A good seo campaign should help, you may also want to give vbseo.com a try.
If you want to make active your existing members those who are not active now, mail them adding this sentence, "We've noticed that you've not been active on our forum for quite some time now, and we miss you!" I hope they will start coming back but you should have some good content for welcoming them back and making them sticky once again
My advice is content, more content and even more of it. In plain words - try to keep your forums up to date, post topics that your visitors and registered users may find intriguing, organize contests. What is most important - all methods have to be visitor-specific, that is, use everything that is to suit your audience. About AdWords - I am skeptical. This method does work better for purely commercial products like corporate websites, etc. Good luck!
There's a lot of useful information in this section of the forum regarding forum promotion, have a skim through some of it for ideas. If you're stuck after that try variations on the methods listed in other topics. Hope this helps. Regards,