Thanks Guys. This is my personal baby which i love and worked stupid amount of hours on. Which SB sites would you recommend ? as theirs millions of them. I do have a xbox Fan site on facebook with about 15 members, but none of them come to the forum. I would have thought the COD style rpg game (fxwars) and a full arcade on the forum would have motivated a few to join but seems fruitless.
What is unique about your forum that all the other general Xbox forums don't have? Once you can nail that down, you'll have an edge that will persuade more people to join. You have to break the immediate reaction of "Oh, it's just another general Xbox forum. Offer competitions, maybe a monthly draw - contact games distributors for review copies of games perhaps. Get controversial... start a thread that generates buzz and gets Digg votes - linkbait will work, everyone loves a train-wreck in a forum thread. Add news. Right now all your forums are sat there waiting for others to contribute. Set up a bunch of Google alerts and the moment an Xbox news story breaks, get it into your 'news' section. Even better, get the news before everyone else - that's tough, though. (I'm just throwing stuff out there, no idea what's feasible for your set-up) Personally I would reduce the number of general sections to your forum and add ones focused on specific games, or specific elements of Xbox gaming (I'm no gamer so cannot suggest more than that). Hope that helps!
lol....tried and trying all that mupha... There is an xbox latest news within the xbox news and announcments category this is an RSS feed, which updates daily. I have also ran comps but nobody seems to bother. Again, i can also assume this is down to pure lack of traffic Eugie17 - I am (moved up from page 12 to page 3 in the last month) but with 49 million other sites its quite tough.
TBH there is nothing unique about your forum so why should people register when they could join a more active community where often they would receive a reply to there questions in mins, getting a new forum off the ground is tuff, very tuff. I closed my Xbox forum because it just wasn't worth the time to continue it, i had a lot of registrations from people who were using our custom gamercard generator, i also had a number of other unqiue features but it was slow to get off the ground. The reason your not getting a great deal of traffic is because they are low traffic keywords so don't expect a flood of traffic even if you rank 1st in Google for 360 forum or related keywords.
You need many posts in your forum, create many questions with their good tips and answers, so then when people visit your website, they found a live forum, they will register and post ! posting also will make more chance to get more trafiic as more pages will be indexed by google.
congrats you've just learnt that SEO is not the whole picture you have to convert them too. no-one likes empty or dead forums and people will put up with all sorts of c**p from busy forums (this one for example) i would be thinking about rent a mob for a while to get it looking busy, then your visitors will register, and it will all snowball.
it shouldn't be too hard. you might not even have to rent. if you have a few friends interested in XBox, you shouldn't even have to pay them
it is much better if you rank good in google plus you can only get traffic only if you focus on link building.
its just because your rankings is far behind the usual position that attract traffics, you need to improve your rankings at least up to 8-10 in page 1. You have to build your backlinks to high pr related websites and study carefully all the competitor sites that ranks well on your niche, and then apply it to yours.
Also that has to be the best looking forum I have seen to date. Did you design it? Have it Designed? Or is it a template? I would love to know
As of today.. Now rank 7th on page 1 msn.com http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=xbox+forum&FORM=MSNH Out of 24m other links