Yesterday, my website got its 250,000th post. It only took about 18 months. Link to my site - http://www.survivalistboards.com/ Stats: - Threads: 23,039, Posts: 250,587, Members: 6,376, Active Members: 1,911 <---- Active members are members that visit every 30 days. Now that my site is getting between 900 - 1,400 post a day, the 500,000 post marker is right around the corner. Its been a long journey, but well worth it. I see a lot of people who talk about starting a forum and expect instant success. That is not how it works. Forums are a lot of work, more so then a blog (I have 2 blogs and 3 forums). With forums you have to deal with trolls, spammers, drama kings and drama queens. Just the modifications on my site can take hours to update. A few months ago I updated all the modification on my site, it took 6 hours. A new version of VBulletin has been released, so its time to update. But this time its only going to take an hour or so. For those of you that are expecting to set up a forum, and get hundreds of members over night, it aint gonna happen. Forums are a lot of work. New forums can expect to take 8 - 10 months before they get any traffic and a year before they get any "real" traffic. But once the traffic starts, you get a few back links, get a few thousand post, a few thousand member, everything will get better.
That must be really some hell of a patience and hard work. From what I see not an easy success. You must be proud of yourself
Thank you. I wish I could say I am proud of myself, but pride gets in the way. I am just the humble servant of my community. Little did I know that running a forum was so much work. When you include promotion, trying to create backlinks, modifications........ Sometimes the whole ordeal can cause mental and emotional overload. What would have really helped, is if I could have found a good resource for creating, running and promoting a forum. For months I thought I was shooting in the dark. Traffic was almost nothing, I might have got 1,000 post a month. I even thought about closing the site. But I kept finding little tips here and there, which I combined with my own ideas to get more traffic. Here I am at the 250,000 post milestone and I ask myself, "Was it worth it?" And to be honest, I dont know. When the site hits 500,000 post, now that might be worth it because the site is growing at a steady rate.
It is an achievement that can make most of us proud. Those that do not allow pride to swell their heads and be able to think logically are those that are well on the road to success. Your achievements are commendable, your attitude is much more admirable, I am sure with such attitude, you can have a great forum like DP in the foreseeable future!
yup, I agree absolutely with your comments. too many people think that its an easy job to create a forum, and the traffic will come flooding in. I now have nearly 30,000 users (8,000 active in the last 30 days) between 5 different poker forums, and its damn hard work. Once it works though, it really works. so to all the noobs out there, if you are totally new at this: aim small, then think big - NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND. MOG
Nice post kev. Fairly accurate. My largest forum hit 500,000 posts before I sold it and I have one now that's about 14-15 months old with about 200k posts and has seen 20,000 signups. Spammers, hacker attempts, and drama rule the day. It's a lot of work. Oddly Kev a few times I have checked your site as you have discussed it before. I just noticed I don't see you monetizing it in any way. Am I wrong? imho that's a big mistake. There are ways to add ads that won't upset your members. With adbrite alone I do very well on my forum. I show inline-text ads to non-members which greatly encourages signups and promotes activity long-term. Once a person is signed up it's easy for them to participate. Also you don't have ads between posts. While that isn't a great earner you should at least do guest display. What's the point of a successful site if it's not monetized?
Even though we have disagreed on a few things, I wish to thank you for the kind post. I am honored by your comments. The site is supported through paid membership subscriptions and merchant accounts. With a paid membership, members get certain "perks", such as a picture gallery, can customize their profile, unlimited downloads in the files section access to the VIP / Premium members section. For a small fee, merchants get their own forum section that they are a moderator over. The merchant can post as many threads, with as many links and as many images as they want in their section. In other words, they get a section they can spam all they want. Merchants post their own contest, descriptions and reviews on as many of their items as they want, but in their section. When the merchants subscription runs out and they decide they do not want to renew, their section is moved out of public view. When the merchant renews their subscription, the forum section is moved back into view of the public with all existing threads intact. I also have an amazon portal and an Ebay portal on the site. Between these three things, I make about 10X what the server bill is every month.
no big deal to get 250K in 3 years.I think the progress was quite decent. 250k- 3 years 83k- 1 year 227 posts per day.
I know what you mean it is a lot of work I have had fourms4hardware.com for about 3 months now and I had no traffic for about 2.9 months I have gotten about 4 new members in the last 4 days and it seams to be picking up just now I hope that traffic keeps growing like this.
Pfft I would love to get 1k posts per month just starting out. My forum is about 3 months old and the stats are: 297 Posts in 71 Topics by 36 Members I'm doing what I can to get it going. It's HARD.
Mine's a little over 2 months old. Threads: 910, Posts: 19,668, Chat Messages: 20,143, Members: 283 I have a well established community that came in and good partners who brought in members. Now, join me
I started my first forum 2.5 months ago an I can tell you its anything but easy... I have been plugging away at my Dog Nutrition Forum and my stats are: Threads: 351, Posts: 2,348, Members: 402, Active Members: 192 It seems my members love talking through 1 post. They don't like to make new threads.
Congrats kev. I own a similar type forum and know how difficult it can be. I've considered giving merchants their own forum too but have not acted on it, I didn't want to do what that OTHER large forum does. Maybe I should but mine is more of a niche than yours.
First thoughts -create a picture section. You might be able to draw in people that are looking for pictures of body builders. Target the women body builders with pictures and you might draw in more males. But you will get more feedback if you create your own thread, instead of asking questions in this one.
Great Job Kev! I think you have made it over the hump so to speak! What type of point system are you referring to RectangleMan?