Any advice on pulling traffic from your forum to the real content?

Leading viewers to content pages

[NoLimits]

I, like many operate a website that contains a forum. While the forum is not MY primary focus, the majority of my viewers congregate there daily. I update my site daily with fresh new content for their viewing pleasure, and the vast majority of them never see it.

I have links to my content pages within the forum, but it's not enough to drive them to it.

Has anyone had any success leading viewers from forums to content pages?

I've nearly given up on milking the forum cow. . . I've been in the stall so long, by the time my buckets full the milk will have gone sour anyways.

[wyweb]

Has anyone had any success leading viewers from forums to content pages?

No, but I can imagine the difficulty. I mean they came for the forum... it's about targeting, no?

I've nearly given up on milking the forum cow. . .

I wasn't aware one existed.... a forum cow? You like that milk?

[buksida]

Two tactics I have used that work are sticky topics that link to your content and links in your signature .

[rogerd]

1) Clear navigation links to relevant topics in the content site - I added an extra column in one forum to address this problem.
2) Make a point when you post to point to resources on the content site. I've found that many forum visitors don't realize there's a content site until they click a link to go there.

[etechsupport]

One thing that attracts customers back to a forum site is constantly updated content,you should try to add few news and some useful and relevant contents, the visitors should come back to read those articles.

[Gargen]

same thing happens to me but aslong as my users are happy i actually have two groups sort of the forum and the site its kinda cool there are a few that cross over

[NoLimits]

I just wanted to follow up and let you guys know how a couple things I tried are working.

1) I built new navigational links that look identical to the forum links (login, logout, check private...etc)

These links did okay, but not as well as I would have liked still. The forum receives 10,000-15,000 views daily and only 200 or so content page views were coming as a result of these links.

2) I created a new forum section at very top of all the other forum sections.

With each new article or content piece I add, I am creating a new post in that section outlining very briefly what the content is about, including a link.

This method is working very well. I am seeing closer to 1,500 additional views on the content pages with the 2 items I mentioned above working together on the forum. It's not fantastic - but I'm going to keep plugging at it.

At any rate - 1500 extra content page views is 1500 that I wouldn't have had a week ago.

The trend will fall if the user's aren't interested in my articles...if the content is good, I'm sure they'll check the updates forum frequently.

[etechsupport]

If you want the spiders come back with some new visitors, you should keep your site update with fresh contents like message boards, news articles and calendared events and few other things.
A fresh content can be obtained even after changing the anchor text of links pointing to a page.

[Musicarl]

Our boards have 2 features that work pretty well for this.

1) A customizealbe sidebar where we put a list of links to our Top 10 widgets of the day.

2) A censor function so anytime someone mentions the name of our site, it becomes a link to the main site.

[Gargen]

Most of my members on the forum have made it to the site, and same in vice versa

[rogerd]

>> With each new article or content piece I add, I am creating a new post in that section outlining very briefly what the content is about, including a link.

That's a great idea, NoLimits - sounds like it's working, too! Thanks for sharing.