Hi, I have a few sites that I would like to add a forum to but the last thing I want is an empty forum. How many visitors a day is it best to be recieving before adding a forum? Also how much extra traffic do they tend to send to your site? obviously depends how popular it is but is there a rough figure e.g. 1 person per 100 posts? Thanks
Anyone, I currently have around 100 uniques visitor a day. Would that be enough or would it just sit empty?
If your 100 uniques per day are all human and genuinely interested in the topic of your site, and you have good content on your site that might lead people in to comment and discussion, then I would say, yes, it would not hurt to add a small forum.
There are always paid services that will have writers come in and populate your forum with content. Of course, you don't need that, if you startup some interesting threads for your niche and write about them on your main site, you will drive traffic to your forum.
Try to contact at least five friends of yours. Encourage them to post and invite others to join. It doesn't matter how many visitors you have. Just develop the content first. Egg and chicken dilemma. Who comes first?
You must first ask yourself if you actually have something to talk about. Then if you feel you do have something to talk about, look at other sites like yours that do have forums. See if the market for discussion is saturated. If you feel you have room, then go ahead and make a forum, but don't just use the default skin, get something that looks professional, even the free ones! Then find a few people that you can get to post with you. Start threads based on the other content on your site, link back and forth from articles to their discussions. That will help those reading your articles find the forum, and those reading the forum find the articles. Bohol gave good advice...