Hello everyone, I am asking for ideas on how to keep people active on your forums, and possibly grab new sign ups in the process? I own a forums site, and I have 55 members and over 1,600 posts, but the hard part is getting new sign ups and active users. I could use all the help I could get right now. All ideas will help, so please give me what you got. Thanks, Devin
you can hire guest posters following the fake it till you make it thinking ask engaging questions, contribute run contests frequently where active participation is required, give out free stuff or just make up custom forum titles for the winners restrict certain parts of the forum/sig usage/custom avatar usage from ppl with low post count, so that would motivate ppl to post more, hopefully not just spam keep the forum moderated, organized, every thread should be in its proper category, nobody likes mess and don't make it to be a big ad
There are some good ideas here that I would expand upon: Does your forum have membership roles? Meaning, can the members do certain things once they hit a certain post count. Contests can be ran lets say once per month with a (just for this conversations purpose) bronze, silver, and gold level. You should ( not that this is a rule or anything) have a fake it till you make thing going on, such as around 20-30 fake profiles creating fake (but relevant) threads. The more users see that a forum is active and informational, the more users will be active. Is there a referral system? Give the forum users some sort of referral reward. Maybe use a reputation type of system. You can also make it so that users cannot post links until they 100 posts (recommended). Just some thoughts.
Hire actual Members to write posts focused on keyword related questions that perform well in competitive Google searches. Depends on what your forum is all about, but lets say the forum is about home improvement. Carefully construct thread titles using common language that accurately reflect what words users are using, such as "Can you paint latex over oil base paint", or "what's the best primer for drywall" or "how to tile a backsplash". It's not enough to have "posts", you need to have posts that compete well in Google search results. I'm using home improvement because over the last 2 weeks I've realized how abysmally piss-poor the entire niche is for providing good-quality data when I'm searching for it. I could write on & on about this, but suffice to say that if I had the time & inclination, I'm pretty confident I could dominate the home improvement forums niche, because everyone else is doing a really poor job of it. Here's one nugget I've learned, and something to look for. Take, for example the question "What's the best primer?" You'd think it's a common question, right? You'd think there'd be TONS of sites that had threads with that title, right? Fck no. I went looking for substantive information and the best I could find on page 1 was some mid-grade forum, in a thread that had a title that didn't even have anything to do with paint, but on page 3 of the thread, post #5, some guy asked the question using the exact same wording as I entered in the Google search. So, I'm thinking that if Google delivers mid-quality forums, thread not relevent, page 3 results as the 4th result on page one, then a thread that is titled with that exact question, word-for-word out to easily hit #1 on page one, right? So, here's the "twist". Different members, different threads, same keywords, but each thread is titled slightly different. "What's the best primer?", "what's the best primer to use on drywall", "what's the best primer to use over oil based paint", "what's a good primer", "Is Zinzer primer good?", "Is latex primer good", etc... Keyword analysis should show which searches get the most traffic, but a thread titled with each of these ought to rank well, and then the substantive content in the threads might encourage visitors to join. Point is don't waste your time with non-native english speakers doing comment spam. When I'm searching forums, I drop the whole site the minute I see this obvious attempt at manipulating. Some of these people love to post, and so paying them even $1.00 per good-quality post could get you ROI. Or not. Obviously there's risk and the great unknown. Depends on your niche. Depends on you too. Most of the people here, attracted to "black hat", really internally translate that to "get something for nothing", and would look for a way to cut the corners of the corners that were left after they cut the corners off. I'm currently toying with a forum idea, and what I intend to do (if I do) is to tie my "prepared" forum posts to certain current events with the idea that when people go searching for certain keywords that are still relatively new, my forum's post would rank well. I don't want to say any more because it's still on my "possible" list. But the idea here is to get your threads to rank well by using a "shotgun" method of having multiple threads with similar, but different, titles. Another way is a method I haven't tried yet (adding this on as an afterthought). So, everyone knows that Torrentfreak "scoops" everyone online with news related to P2P filesharing, right? All good, right? Can't beat Torrentfreak, right? Wrong. I think I can beat TF, because TF writes for a 14 yo mindset. Their opinion is shallow, they lack a substantive legal perspective and their comments sections are truly the worst of the worst. And their commentors are truly bad too. I'd feature the best comments (even if I had to make them myself) on page 1, in reaction to my re-write of the Torrentfreak article (take the information, source it correctly, but present it much better, then offer better commentary, and then increase the quality of the comments in reaction to that commentary). TF is fcking LAME and LAZY. Like taking candy from an infant. Sure, they get the best scoops. Where else would you send it? Then you run into wikipedia and the fights over whether or not TF is a "reliable source". Once you get "reliable source" credentials, wikipedia starts backlinking to your articles, even if you stole the information directly from TF.
Agreed. But good ones. Don't have nasal sounding adolescents saying umm for 30 minutes. Chop it up in video editting as much as necessary to keep it as brief as possible. Don't waste not 2 seconds of the visitor's time. Girls with nice boobs are always a major PLUS, but only if they know what they are talking about. Otherwise it's just a soft-core porn video using your niche as a set and/or props. Have directions that follow the video. Sometimes I want to read how to do it, and sometimes I want to watch, but never has anyone given me a chance to do both at the same time. Read material on the topic while half-watching the video simultaneously. I learn FAST, and keeping up with my mind really determines whether or not I'm going to watch a video tutorial or not. Sometimes I find these guys that truly "get it". They say exactly what needs to be said at each step in the process, and not one single word more than that. When I'm pressing the "pause" button so I can research what the dude just referred to, I'm in LOVE with that YouTube channel. Don't skip any steps, but don't waste even 2 seconds of my time. I actually LIKE lots of sudden and abrupt breaks and restarts.
