Hello, I need some advice.. I have some cash.. Not much. But anyways. I need traffic/active members at my forum. I dont know whats the best thing to do. any help?
What I did to jumpstart my forum was provide a free ecourse, where each lesson provided a sales plan for my niche. I also let subscribers know that a forum was available if they wanted more tips or had questions about the course. I then wrote an eBook on the same topic of my course, which is also the niche of my forum, and created sales tools for the eBook and sold it with resell rights. The eBook links to my ecourse, the ecourse links to my forum in every lesson. It took 6 months but my forum is now active with hundreds of pages indexed, and over 30 active posters. It may not seem like much, but it's working for me and I'm very happy with the results. The active posters post a lot. I installed a points system in the forum where members can earn points for posting, and redeem them for products. I'm paying about a penny per post in redemptions and members are happy receiving free products. The eBook on the other hand does the advertising for me, and there are others reselling it on eBay and from their websites so I expect the forum to do much better as the eBook continues to virally spread. I implemented this plan after my forum stayed inactive for over a year, despite adwords and other advertising methods. It may not be producing fast results for me, but it's producing steady results with devoted members. You could give something like this a try.
If your forum is getting some good search engine traffic just few sign ups, you can usually attract new users by livening things up with a few new members and posts. People are also more likely to return to a forum with lots of activity than a dormant one. To help you with this you can advertise for posters in the content creation forum. People will be prepared to work for you for about 5 - 10 cents per post.
Althema, The forum I created has been a natural outgrowth of one of my sites (TwoPercentClub.com), so I don't have the experience a really promoting a forum per se, but I thought your advice was excellent for someone working in the "other direction." ....a green rep to you. Jim
Wow thanks Jim, my first Rep. Many thanks!!! That was extremely nice of you. I'm not sure what you mean by the "other direction" but I take it a green rep means it's positive. If you mean by using other advertising methods, it's slower than most I know but it is better than others. I was sadly disappointed with my adwords, so I tried to think of something that would produce better results. I figured if people used autoresponders to increase sales, by letting subscribers get familiar with them, thus earning trust, then surely it would work for forums as well. It's actually not only improving my forum activity (thus my rankings), but it's also building my subscriber list and increasing my affiliate income, not to mention increasing my adsense income. I've invested a lot of time and money in my forum, I couldn't let a huge advertising bill stop me. I just decided to keep trying different methods until I found what works for me. I would definately recommend others try it, especially if they have forums related to niches that are so oversaturated that they can't get a foot in the door. It's a lot of fun having your competitors promote your products for you, and I do see some of my competitors selling my eBook from their websites. But then again, it may be more work than some would want to do for their forum. I don't know.
Prog, you write a series of lessons, usually about half a page to one page long, that teaches something. Set them up as autoresponder messages so that they are delivered to subscribers on set dates. My ecouse consists of 30 daily lessons in the organic niche, on how to grow organic vegetables (organic is a good niche due to people wanting to eat healthier, and health is a very huge niche). My course stands out a bit, because my lessons teach others how to do this by raising their own worms. The worm tea is great for plants, and the worm poo is a perfect fertilizer (it's just very rich and black dirt once the worm passes it). I took a huge niche, and got my foot in it by selling information on how people can not only use worms to grow their own healthy vegetables, but my ecourse also teaches them how to start a business doing this as well (selling worm tea, worm poo and organic vegetable to those that do not have the time to grow). Worm farming is a hard thing to do, because everything can be wiped out overnight if one is not careful, and the worms can't eat just anything (although some mistakenly think they can and then wonder why their soil is rank). So my ecourse teaches people how to ensure that their worms stay healthy, happy and also how to prevent them from straying (rain is one of the worst culprits, if they get too wet, they will leave their beds), as well as other tidbits of information. Since not everything can be taught in 30 emails, I give just enough information in each lesson to perk their interest, and then direct to the forum so they can learn more about the tidbits provided in the ecourse. I figure that if they do not join the forum within 30 days, then they never will, so that's my limit. Can you see I love worms and gardening You can host the ecourse on it's own domain name, or as a seperate page from your main website. I had a problem with people remembering the page from my main website so I put it on it's own domain. I used to host an autoresponder (ARPlus) using my own web hosting provider, but I got tired of AOL complaints of spam from double opt-in subcribers so I moved the ecourse to Aweber where they can deal with any spam complaints in the future. I know my subscribers confirm sign-ups, but AOL doesn't care about IP records from a small business, and I have heard that Aweber is very good about handling complaints, if they are indeed double opt-in subscribers. If you can think of a way to stand-out from the norm (worms in a health niche or something like that), then you will do extremely well if you decide to do the ecourse. Just today I got 3 visits from googlebot, 4 new registrations, one is active, and 78 new pages indexed in the past week. As I said, that may not seem like much, but I'm very happy with it. The googlebot is visting daily now, which was something I could only dream of this time last year. In another year, I hope to have better rankings as well. This plan does work, although it is slower than what most webmasters like. I'm a patient person...and for me there is no hurry. My worms are not going anywhere, and I am actually making a profit myself now that I am not spending all of my profits in advertising campaigns. It does work, if one can be patient, and if one can get the eBook out to as many resellers as possible I held one eBay auction, selling the eBook for .99. I know that is low, but I wasn't trying to profit from the eBook sales, that was never my intention, I wanted others selling it for me and advertising my ecourse for me. If the information is good, people will resell eBooks, even if they only paid 99 cents for it. I also contacted a few yahoo groups owners, in the health niche, and asked them if they would like to give the eBook as a gift to their members. Not one turned me down, they loved the eBook, and I've just sat back and enjoyed my forum since. I'll probably do another auction one day, but right now I am still trying to improve the forum and spending time getting to know the new members. I hope this wasn't too much information I know some people get grossed about when it comes to worms, and talking about eating food that was grown in worm poo....but poo really is nothing but rich organic dirt. So much better than fertilizer. (OK now I have probably grossed out a lot of people, I hope that no one thinks badly of my niche....I've been laughed out of other forums, but it is something that is growing in popularity and other gardeners that laugh, don't laugh for long when they see my Tomatoes 3 times bigger than their own, they want to buy my worm poo then).
Thanks for the information + rep for that But I dont understand the subscription part. And what do you think about buying traffic/advertise? and links?
Maybe look at a downline type of model such as in network marketing. Spend the money you have on creating a viral type of marketing system for your forum. Put a cash incentive into posting and recruiting. I know of forums where people get paid to post and refer others ie netpond.com etc If you think "viral" your forum should grow. So this is what I would spend my cash on...