Hi, Im the co-owner of Freelancegossip.com and my site stats are below: Threads: 1,070 Posts: 4,642 Members: 596 I'm having a hard time getting people to keep active...My Staff is more active than members themself. Im thinking about upgrading my forum to the newest version of Vbulletin to see if that helps maybe. I have done a mass email to all members on the forum to see if they would come back and post. Im planning to add a membership required area including a casino and adult area. Im just running out of ideas. I was thinking of doing a contest to run for one month and getting the top 4 posters prizes but im not sure if that will work. Anyone who may have ideas or advice or even go to my site and post it would be so appreciated....
One thing you can do is subscribe to the RSS feeds from peoples blogs. Let these subscriptions be from people that are in "the know" of things. Who are the movers and shakers of your industry? Those are the people who you want to subscribe to. First create a few account names for these bots. I have a feed account on my site called "Newsfeed" This RSS posting bot pulls RSS news feeds from yahoo news, bbc and a few other news websites. In Vbulletin you can set up an RSS posting service. Go to control panel - RSS feeds (its on the left column 3/4 of the way down) and fill out the forms to set up the posting bot. Set the update times from about 30 minutes to 4 or 6 hours. That way the bot does not flood your site. If you pull from a lot of sources and set the update time to every 30 minutes, you will get a ton of new threads started. My site has one bot posting in 3 different forums, from about 6 different sources. With the news posting bot I provide a forum section that the most recent news is posted in for my paying members. Once you have made a few test, set the bots to pull from certain peoples blogs. You will get keywords relevant to your site and lots of new threads started. And the person you are pulling the RSS feed from gets free links - everyone is happy.
I can do you a review here: http://www.adminfuel.com/ You can find lots of things to help you. What have you tried so far?
give them a reason to be active, run some contest, give some items away That's what I've done and still do and here is a list of 21 Forums to have your website reviewed
Thanks. I will give that a try. I have written a proposal out and have been sending it to different sites/companies for review and am waiting for replies to get sponsorship so that I may get help to run contest. I got one company to give 3 copies of a product however the product is all that great. I have a members area created and ready to add things but I have nothing to really add ...which is the reason for sponsorship/partnership. I did one banner contest on DP but it got ruined by someone hijacking it and no one ever entered. I'm not sure what to offer other than free adspace because I haven't got up the money to get products/money to offer in the contest. I will go thru that list and see what I can do. Thanks guys, I really hope to make it successful. My staff their is helping as much as they can...but I guess I need more ideas on how to approach other webmasters and forum owners to get help with some type of sponsorship/partnership and get up the money for a prized packed contest to see if that helps.