Forum Moderators: rogerd
What would you suggest?
Thank You.
you wouldn't have a party simply by inviting people in to a room and hope they all get along ...
It's like any other club at has to seem to be an exciting place to go.. it has to fulfill a need and have enough sticky content to entice people back..
Regular, fun/interesting/informative, newsletters help.
Having a place where people can have their questions answered, helps, a sense of expertise helps..
Advertising/reviews in your industries periodicals would help .. like any other business you have to let people know there is something going on and that your place is the best place to be for accountancy in education... A tough demographic ;-)
Add features that would be of use to your audinece.. maybe some calculation/interesting widget?
But get real and be honest with yourself.. the problem is not the people, it is the website, not fulfilling a need and not promoting yourself correctly..
mostly it's just long hours and hard work.. Good Luck!
1) Hire one of they "paid posts" services I would order 500 posts to get things started.
2) Its now your job to let your reg. members know that the forum is active and that people are posting. I would do this by Newsletter with site news, latest topics, and include some information that would get them interested like talk about the subject that they signed up to talk about in the first place.
3) Promote the topics maybe on your home page get the word out that your forum is active your members are posting.
4) You can’t sit and watch the snowball go down the hill, Its your job to promote, promote - promote.
5) Friendly, this is important - make it a community not a resource add your touch, welcome new people and engage conversation with the older members.
6) Make sure each poster knows they're apart of your community - "A loved cat will always come back" (I made that up but sounds funny) :)
7) * Other people please add here *
A few questions...
- Is the forum fairly old? It's common to have turnover of members over time so that the total number keeps rising even though the active total stays the same.
- Do these non-posting members visit the forum to read, or are they complete dropouts? Getting lurkers to post is usually easier than bringing back long-gone members.
- Is registration required to read or to access features? If so, that could explain why people register and never post. In my experience, in an open forum most people won't register unless they want to post.
I would be cerefull with those paid posters which rj87uk wrote about. I haven't tried such service personally, but have read a lot on this subject. Those "paid posters" can be good if you have a general forum, but the more specific subject of your forum the less usefull are the paid posters. The forum of Rolozo is not for everyone, i don't think there would be many paid posters with knowledge about Accountancy Education (correct me if i'm wrong)..
~Paid posting is not right thing for my niche.
Here are a couple of thoughts: do you need to be registered to search? to view images? signatures? etc? Even the smallest option that a guest can't see could prompt them to register as a member...
What do you mean by "paid posts" services?
One thing you could try is to set up a "private" section of the board that is only available to members with over x posts in the main forums.
In the email sent to newly-registered users you could insert some ideas for posts, for example a paragraph describing the five hottest topics-of-the-moment, or even some old chestnuts relating to your industry. Include a link to a thread on the forum. Change this as the threads fill up.
For those of you with so many non-posters, why do you think people register at all.
(The new "login required" policy here will no doubt have that effect, since even readers will need to register.)
He, he... I guess a forum devoted to overcoming introversion might be a tough one to get off the ground!
That's an interesting thought, though, along with the possibility that accountants might not want to post questions for fear that it would appear they didn't know everything they were supposed to know.
I've got a sure-fire thread topic, though: something along the lines of "client horror stories" or "stupid client tricks". I bet just about every accountant who works for clients (or even company management) has a few of those that they are dying to share. ;)
