My opposition is crushing me .... Help me with advertising etc

My opposition URL=http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk is beating my site quite badly ( www.students-forum.com). Mine has only opened quite recently but as you can see they have seeminly saturated the market singly handedly . I feel destroyed.

My site looks better, offers better facilities and has much more potential. What can i do to win back my audience and eventually catch up or even beat that site .

Anyone please advise me.

 

Time and effort are all its takes, don't get put down, i have felt like that myself before
They have obviously been around alot longer and you just need the time to catch up

 

I have put so MUCH effort into this site. There site just is all over the SERPS . I am finding my morale is lowering everytime i view there site as the members increase by 1000's a day.

 

I was explaing that exact problem to a friend of mine over yahoo messenger, he then told me that he hates viewing MY site because it gets HIS morale down, then he stated thats why he doesn't visit my site

Since then i havent visited competitors that are whooping my ass and i genuinely feel a bit better

The main problem at trying to compete with a site that is miles ahead is that they have a kick start, you will either need to find an avenue they havent explored.

Another option is to disregard what i said above and become a really active and useful member of their forum with your forum in your signature You will be targetting the right audience and when they see your site they will realise what fools they have been to be attached to your competitor

 

How can you "win back" an audience you never had?

Don't feel too despondant. It takes time, patience and perseverance to gain a foothold in any market area. Patience is the virtue no-one wants to use, unfortunately.

 

I think I have your problem in a nutshell, dude.

Your site has a split personality. It wants to be a forum for students but it has the graphical element of a tween site (10 - 12). As much as I liked the 'feel' of your site, if I was a student (oh, they were the days ... I could tell you a few stories about my younger days ... ahem, sorry 'bout that) I would expect to be casting off any remnants and reminders of childhood and I would look disdainfully upon anything that tried to drag me back there. I am an adult! Treat me like one! You know what I mean?

 

Ah god. That means a re- design right? Im on it.

 

Only minor cosmetics. Nothing too major.

Best thing you can do when you are feeling like you are is take a few days off. No computer. At all. Do something else instead, even if it's just blobbing about watching the box or getting smashed in the pub. You will then have fresh eyes and feel better and more enthusiastic and crucially, you will be more productive.

 

I got a martial arts tournament coming up so i shall be training hard for that anyway. Anyone want to help me with this project or is a vbulletin skinner wanting some work?

Edit : What should i change about the design ... any ideas?

 

The first thing to do is fill in your target audience that your site exists. Find sites they visit and consider advertising. You will have problems if you have an inactive forum. It's generally easier to start out building a visitor community, then open a forum for them once you have significant traffic.

PRWeb is useful too if you can come up with a newsworthy press release.

The keys to building a community are in no particular order:

1) empower the community
2) encourage interaction between visitors in some fashion.
3) free stuff - be it tools, prizes, whatever
4) quality content
5) fresh content
6) community involvement - getting involved in the community outside of your own site.
7) reliability
8) solid design - not only from an aesthetic perspective, but from a navigation perspective as well.
9) don't ignore the 56K modem users. Heavy graphics are fine, but not on your most frequently visited pages. Your design shouldn't outweigh your best content.

My 2 cents. Feel free to ignore me.

 

My immediate view on this is that your initial page (vbAdvanced?) doesn't really say a lot for what sections your forum has to offer...
In comparison I visited student rooms for a quick look and saw a list of universities listed, so naturally I wanted to check if mine was there (Loughborough). When I found it and some discussion around it I signed up straight away to be honest

Also I did a check to see how many pages you had indexed in Google against your competitor...

site:http://www.students-forum.com gave 14,200
site:http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk gave 666,000

They have a hell of a lot of content and opinions from people which will attract new visitors, I think you just need to get some useful threads going to draw people to the site.

Do you have a fun and games section (Not VB arcade, games aren't original enough I don't think) with student type games, cos I know a lot of the lads at my uni waste plenty of time playin silly flash games, a lot of the time from e-mails that have been forwarded on from other students...maybe viral e-mails with a link back to your site and to a few games/images/silly sites may be the way to get people to visit your site...I think decent content is the thing that will make people want to regisiter

 

I'm similarly competing against forums with 1.5 million posts but it can be done. While I'm not exactly there, or anywhere near with a lot of persistence and effort you can quite easily build your site up to be a reasonably active forum. I felt that a lot of members came from the larger forums to mine because it felt like a closer community and I snapped them up as moderators. Just persist and if it really lowers your morale don't look at their site, and concentrate on your own site solely. Once you polish your site the visitors will come.

And, as other people have said a wide range of threads and add interactive sections. Forums get boring, and at first glance it appeared you had none of those. Maybe your homepage should put huge emphasis on these features as they are the king of thing that attract people (and perhaps limit them to those with only over 10 posts to build up some activity).

Finally, get some friends on it as I've found that is the singularly best way to build up some posts etc. at the start with a bit of friendly banter. You don't need too many, just get 10 or so. All my friends who joined my forums got it started up nicely with loads of posts and they all have at least 1000 posts on the site now, some with almost 5000.

Hope that helped,

- Ed

 

Also look into where your eyes are diverted. On the main page I instantly see the smiley face as it is smack bang in the centre. Might want to reconsider this as I can't look at anything on the page without my eyes being diverted back to it. While it looks cool, it makes your main homepage message hard to get across and makes the page as useful as a splash page.

 

Do you think that the actually design needs a change though? Do you feel as if it makes you feel childish.

 

Yes. The purple, Nemo and the smilies have nothing to do with students. Replace them with a pint of Beer, a fit bird in St Trinity outfit and a graduation certificate and you give them more to relate to instantly.

The Uni list is a good suggestion. You could also look into geotargeting and serve some dynamic stuff. Shouldn't be too hard to come up with the nearest Uni based on IP. Then you can locate bars, clubs and what not for them. Take DP as an example. Shawn waited until he had a big user base for his tools before starting the forum. You can get more users if you offer more 'tools' or info.

There's many ways to market your forum as well. It only takes a 'custom' laser pointer in a big college theatre to get x hundred students to see the address.

If you're serious about this you could buy them out.

 

If you aren't doing so already, go participate in their forum and get people to check out your site. Try not too blatently spam their messageboard but just offer helpful advice or links to the helpful advice on your site.

 

Ok changed template now peeps www.students-forum.com

 

As others have said, "you just have to be patient and give it time".

Your site may be better, but the other one has been around longer, so they are in the SE, but yours will catch up over time.

 

It's not my post, but thanks for the comments Nevets. I'm new and had made a list that seems to be mostly the same as the ones that you had listed. However, I wasnt sure if I should make a forum while I'm getting my traffic up, or open it later. I think I'll wait then. =)

 

Whoa, your competition is dominating you right now. As a new entrant you've sort of got an advantage though. Analyze what they're doing and find out how you can do it better.

First off you can improve on design. Make your site eye candy so people will be tempted to visit longer. Offer content your competitor cant. Run events that your competitor has no clue about.

It comes down to your competitive advantage.