There has to be something wrong here, my forum EliteTopics.com has been running for about 8 months now. I am continuously upgrading it and adding more features. I've spent over $700 in Advertising costs, VB license, mods, paid posting, skins, hosting, etc. Not to mention the countless hours that I could have spent getting a life. There is no activity on my forum, it says I have 206 members, but that was mostly spam bots, I have about 5 active users and I don't even see them anymore. I see forums that are running for less than 3 months and have more than triple my traffic. I made many modification to my forum to improve SEO, submitted my forum to many search engines, update my sitemaps. I spent $400 advertising with Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. It seems that when someone clicks the link, they see something they don't like and leave. Out of hundreds of clicks, only about 3 members converted. I advertise and promote my site on every forum I can. I've even told my friends about it and they didn't even want to bother with it. Is it the skin? The topic? The name? If having a forum wasn't a hobby of mine, I wouldn't have spent so much time, effort and money on it. But some hobbies are just not meant to be, and I would hate to give up on it. I even tried creating another forum PostExchanger as a service to people in the same sad situation as me, but that forum is pathetic too, no matter how much advertising I put into it I still can't get anybody to join. I really don't want to give up here. So I must ask, what the hell is wrong with my forum?
You need to answer a simple question, why would some one join your forum, its like many other forums You are not giving any thing new, i can find all the news on the internet regarding apple, mobile phone so why would i go to your forum
You are very right george, but why do people join other forums that are similar to mine? So what do you suggest I do, hand out money?
NO!!! Throwing money at a problem never solves anything. It "might" be a short term fix, but when its over your right back to where you started from. My solution for my forum was video blogging on youtube. Over the past 21 months I have uploaded over 300 videos. My videos get around 10,000 daily views. This sends my forum a steady stream of people. Video blogging might not be for you, but if you wish to start down that path I would be willing to offer some advice. And the best thing about video blogging - its free. ===== EDIT ====== Maybe you should tell your moderators to tone it down a little http://elitetopics.com/pc-gaming/318-fortress-forever-screen-shots-picture-heavy.html I posted a thread with several images, and even put "Picture Heavy" in the title just for dial up users. And then the moderator tells me to keep dial up users in mind? I did keep them in mind, I put "Picture Heavy" in the title. What more do you want? The images were removed and replaced with links. I see this as being a heavy handed admin. Just because that moderator has dial up does not mean that he should be editing threads to meet his needs. Maybe your staff could start being nicer to new members. That way they will stick around a little longer.
Hey Kev, I saw that a few days ago and I thought the same. This is the first complaint that I had about a moderator, but I don't think that's the problem here. I don't think I would be any good at video blogging, I'm trying to find other methods. Oh, and I was just kidding about the money thing.
Video blogging is not for everyone, so its not a one size fits all solution. I just thought I would bring it up. Every successful forum taps into a certain market. If your forum is not growing, then you have not targeted your audience. But that is also part of the problem, how do you target your audience? Every group of people is different. So you have to figure out "who" you want to register on your forum, and then advertise to target that group.
I dont think there is anything unique about the forum. It seems like you're spending money on advertising and not getting anything in return because of what I just mentioned. I would start off with a new plan and creating a skin and ideas that flow into what your plan is.
Sinnce there is so many different forums devoted to all of those topics listed, I would suggest that you go different route. You have a wicked domain name and could be used for a totally different approach. Maybe a website like www.topix.com but with a certain niche such as elite gaming. Check out their forums and the whole site in general. You might be able to use it as a muse and gather some ideas for a different approach. Don't get too frustrated over this, it has happened to me countless times. Like I said your domain is awesome and you could really turn this original idea into something bigger. Search around script websites randomly for scripts that might also give you some good ideas Don't give up bro!
I've spent like 10 minutes looking over your forum, and to be hoenst there's really nothing wrong with it. You just need to advertise to a certain targetted audience, throw some money in advertising like that, try making videos.. and get some partners that could help you out.
I have an idea, may be its not suitable for you. Print your Banner, a small banner and post it into pubic toilets. I have done that for my forum. Contact some schools or colleges, put your banners as "Sponsored by" , request them like this forum is your bread and butter In my case, I am planning to do that, with Engineering colleges as my forum is related with Technology and updates. May be this will help you. As Kev told, you can drive more traffic from youtube. Send some bulk SMS to all those people you know. Do something like any1 has never done before. If there is any cyber cafe near you, request them to put your website like on their monitors. (Stickers) I think this may help you. If there is any place of rush, this is the best opportunity for you where you can put your banners. Best of luck.
I like the idea of having less forums for the time being. It seems lonely when someone looks at your site and sees several forums to choose from but each forum only has 100 or less topics. Hoepfully your forum platform will allow you to reassign topics to different forums later on.
Create a blog about your forum. And then send traffic to your forum site from your blog. For those who subscribe to your blog, suggest to them to register and post topics in your forum. Also, don't wait for people to post quality threads in your forum site. You just have to do it yourself to ensure quality topics.
I have a blog, I started it when I opened my forum to help with the traffic but that didnt work either.
Error47 - do you have a way to measure the traffic going to your site? So you can see what the most popular section of your forum is? If you have not installed google analytics, I suggest you do so. Using the information provided by google analytics you will be able to see what sections of your forum are getting the most traffic. Instead of posting all over the place, you can focus a lot of your new threads and post into the most busy sections. To create new threads, you could use the built in RSS posting bot. Vbulletin has this feature built in. Grab an RSS feed from somewhere like yahoo news, set the bot to post X number of threads every X number of hours. I'am using the bot on my sons site to fill up a certain section. The RSS posting bot pulls an RSS feed from about 6 sites and creates about 10 - 12 new threads every 12 hours. In just a few days several dozen new threads get posted. This is a quick way to build up content. When you have a few hundred threads in each section, change the setting on the bot and point it towards another forum section with another feed.
I know a good way to boilt a forum fast is to give support for things you know alot about, it will take alot of time giving the support to people but in the end it will be worth it, just think of thingthing and market it as the place to get help on that subject as long as its not something like programming help or webmastering it has to be something very spesific. I run a forum its a support forum for a php script its been going for about 2 months so far it has 2000+ posts and about 20 active posters
Two Problems: 1. Too many categories 2. Forum Design Choose a light weight forum design like blue green same as DP, post quality content and one more thing stay friendly with your members.