Well I just finished designing and adding all the features to my forum Now I am at a stage to finally launch it, But I am clueless on how to get atleast 100 UV a day and get 2 to 3 members a day I dont want huge numbers of members but only very little active members.Well that is what usually happens with paid posting. Any other promotion techniques?? Senior forum owners in DP please help This is my forum btw Sports Forum
Start your own sports show on youtube. Something like what ESPN does, where a bunch of the old players will get together and talk about the teams. Take a look at this youtube channel - http://www.youtube.com/user/travisandjonathan They are: #84 - Most Subscribed (All Time) - Comedians #34 - Most Viewed (Today) - Comedians #44 - Most Viewed (This Week) - Comedians #50 - Most Viewed (This Month) - Comedians #47 - Most Viewed (All Time) - Comedians With a total of 17,923 subscribers and their youtube channel has been viewed 547,430 times. They are also a youtube partner meaning they make money from their videos and have channel branding options. Here is another example, and this is my youtube channel - http://www.youtube.com/user/survivalistboards And here is my forum - http://www.survivalistboards.com/ I have been using youtube for a year and half to drive traffic to my forums. In that year and a half, my forum has gotten over 8,300 members and over 330,000 post. While other forums in the same nitch, and that were started before mine only have a fraction of my post and membership. Instead of waiting for people to go to you, you need to go to where the people hang out. And another thing I would do, is get rid of that PHPBB forum software and either go with Invision Power Board or VBulletin. PHPBB looks like a cheap piece of software, and well, it is cheap - its free.
I am sure will use!! Youttube!! But I dont have the money to buy VB, Its my first forum. Once I GET the money I needed I will convert it into VB!! Until then I will be using PHPBB3 Actually it has the same features as VB
1. Create a video and post it on video streaming websites. [Promote it] 2. Build networks with other sports bloggers as well as major sports website. 3. Promote your forum in other forums like this one.
What you need to do is stay active on it yourself and find a few other people who are friends of yours etc to get on there and talk sports. A lot of time the fastest growing forums are all from word of mouth and not from SEO or any other type of marketing. As far as building a forum and needing VB, I have started many forums and have marketed them for my own company and other companies and we actually use PHPBB more than we do VB. They both now in there later versions are nearly identical so I do not see anything there that would cause a problem.
Yes!! I didnt find any difference from VB and phpbb in terms of features!! Atleast I have made sure that the forum has most of the features that a forum member needs. Arcade Gallery Instant Reply Avatars Ranks Blog Do phpbb has everything but SEO is a problem, but I am working on it too!! The URL's on a phpbb3 forum doesnt look like SEO friendly.They are long and contain nothing about the topics thanks for the comments ,it now gives me some confidence on using Phpbb3, nice to here that some else have suceeded using Phpbb I am correct even DP was started with phpbb. Anyway the worlds biggest forum still runs on phpbb
That is why PHPbb is open source so you can edit the code to make them SEO friendly. A lot of the has to do with the themes/styles you add to your forum.
I have started a football forum on the back of a site that gets 4-5000 uniques per month and i cant get that to take off. That gets more than 150 uniques a day. Personal experience says forums are very hard to get off the ground. I would build a site upto getting 5000-10000 uniques per month then add a forum. Conversion rates on new forums are less than 1% your wanting 2-3% on a site getting less than 100 uniques a day. The odds are very much against you im afraid. Tony
There is an interesting post which explains some methods how to promote your sports forum and all the methods are free and you can start applying them even now http://www.olgizenullari.com/how-to-properly-promote-a-sports-site/ Cheers Olgi
As for PHPBB and its ability for Search Engine Optimization - Install phpbb into a forums folder, and install wordpress in the HTML root folder. Disable new memberships and comments on your wordpress site, and use it more for a blogging platform. At the end of every post on your blog, post a link to your forums. Here is a simple little wordpress website and forum I set up for my son exactly how I have it described above. Wordpress landing page - http://www.fortresstraining.com/ The Forums - http://www.fortresstraining.com/forum/ For my main forum I have 2 portal sites that are running wordpress. I post articles on the website, then provide a link to the forums inside the article and at the end. Now comes the really cool part - I will post a video on youtube, embed it into my forums (streaming from youtube), then write an article about the video and embed it again into the portal website. So I get three uses of the video - youtube, forum and website. At the end of the article on my website I will post a link to the thread in my forums. I also bought up several domain names that are close to mine, so my sites grab a lot of results in the search engine results page. As for PHPBB and VBulletin comparison, I have posted several write ups in the forum administration section of digital point. If you "really" want to discuss the difference between phpbb and VB, lets do it over in the forum administration section. Just so you will know, by using these techniques my site gets over 50,000 uniques a month, over 1.8 million page views a month, between 1,000 - 1,700 post a day and 20 - 50 new members daily. And my site is ranked in the top 27,000 websites worldwide - http://www.quantcast.com/survivalistboards.com The traffic tag was installed back in July. In all I have about a dozen websites directing traffic to my forums: youtube metacafe dailmotion myspace break.com yahoo video survivalboards.com - a portal site survivalforum.us - a portal site and several more video hosting sites that I can not even think of their names. So my suggestion is video hosting sites, and a couple of portals running wordpress.
I think you are using SMF as your board in your sons website!! But what softwarea re you using for quantcast.It looks impressive!! I am using Orkut as an platform to promote my forum!! I am planning by communities there!! Then promote the forum with those communities. I already have videos with 1 lakh views but I am using it for my other websites!! Waiting for the right moment to release the next set of videos aimed at my Forum. Seo , I managed to code, but I didnt get the URL to work. So satring down the barrle with SEO, But the good thing my website has already been ranked in the top 100 results for sports forums I did promote it in SEO ways. But the offline promotion is what I feel lacks in my campaign