Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Its been almost 8 months and people still do not post.
I receive less than 15 visitors/day from Google although I have used keywords that bring hundreds of visitors/day on my other sites.
I had thought that forums was a great way to bring in organic traffic and monetizing it was the difficult part.
It seems that I am having lots of difficulty in taking the first step (drawing traffic) never mind the second (monetizing)
I must be missing something.... Any data/statistics on your forums to help compare where I stand and any feedback and suggestions is greatly appreciated.
Either you are not getting visitors because google is not pointing them in your direction, or you are getting visitors and they are not interested in posting on your site. Those are two different problems.
"all these posts and only xx members"Never knew Google had the learning ability to do that. :) But interesting point.
Is it SEO'd? Well no. I just installed vBulletin.
The site doesnt have backlinks since its all text similar to WW and people tend to link to Images/Videos more often.
I think the no-backlink is a major issue BUT I had previously linked from a .edu site to the forum the first 3 months using keywords123, but my other websites still ranked much better. Then I changed it, linking those keywords123 to my main site to guarantee #1 position since the linking to the forum didnt do much.
I havent linked to the forum from my other sites ever since. I want the site to look a bit more active before I send traffic BUT 10-12 visitors/day from Google is pretty depressing esp. considering the fact that I spent so much time researching and typing.
I email friends every once in a while to encourage them to post but I realized I spent too much energy on pursuading friends who showed no interest and so I started creating new accounts.
Ill be honest, its boring writing to yourself, so I cant expect much from friends and dont blame them for not wanting to be active members.
Any data/stats on your own forums?
I wonder if I should allow users to publish pics/videos and add signatures until I get traffic and then change the settings?
Or do I just need to continue what Im doing for another year or two and wait.
p.s.> Please Help before I turn crazy and sound crazier on my forum and lose that little traffic that I already have! ;)
I wonder what percentage of members here on WW tend to read more rather than post! My visitors may be reading threads but dont bother to register to comment.
[edited by: dailypress at 3:22 pm (utc) on July 22, 2009]
I'm not sure if a forum can easily stand alone, without a critical mass of interested parties in at the start. Much easier to have a blog or content site for traffic acquisition, and then fora for discussion on subjects raised.
As of now I have: Threads: 57, Posts: 208, Members: 12
does it sound too unreasonable?
for every active member, there were 3-4 lurkersEven that suggests I should have at least 1-2 active members.
Although 25% sounds too much at least for a relatively new forum. For a huge forum like WW I could agree on that percentage.
If I can get 2 people who dont know each other start debating on my forum that would be great. but as of now im pretty much alone.
I think ill give it exactly one year, if things dont pick up Ill send traffic from my main sites to initiate a spark. once things pick up ill remove the backlinks.
Whenever I see a high-ranking forum, it is ALWAYS very active. Even when the returned thread is dormant, the site itself is not.
I got it going in part by talking to various versions of myself and in part by spending just a couple of GBP a day on adwords. Made for very targeted traffic. It gradually turned into an active forum that people would link to and the adwords budget was gradually turned down, and then off, as I got good organic results on useful phrases that brought people in.
This was about 5/6 years ago now though so might be more expensive these days.
for every active member, there were 3-4 lurkers.
I bet that's way out and even 10 would be on the low side. I don't know how we could prove it without someone divulging their high-traffic forum website figures...eh B.T?
1. Martinibuster started a good thread in 2006 about getting a forum started: [webmasterworld.com...] - in fact, our Community Building and Social Networks forum [webmasterworld.com] is dedicated to this kind of question.
2. You said "Is it SEO'd? Well no. I just installed vBulletin." So I'd suggest reading this thread - [webmasterworld.com...]
I remember sitting and looking at my stats four years ago... maybe 4 or 5 referrals a day from ALL of the search engines combined... my forum only having a handful of trolls/spammers.
As of this month, I'm getting about 70,000 uniques per month... not earth shattering but definitely in the right direction. I did it by using every spare moment of my time ethically SEO'ing my forum (mainly eliminating dupe content), talking to myself, answering unanswered threads AUTHORITATIVELY by researching before answering, where my knowledge was insufficient).
Critically, my forum threads now rank very well in all of the search engines, often even better that my static content. I've managed to nurture a core base of members that log in and post daily, and if you can't get that happening, you'll never come even close to critical mass.
Forums are hard work, that's for sure... are they worth the investment in time?...
My static content, just 251 pages of it (good quality and well written, all by me) still generates more money than the tens of thousands of forum pages... but in my case, I don't think the static content would work as well without the forum community, which I think lends some kind of authority to the quality of the static content.
dailypress, you've been at it for less than a year. It's just not long enough. Don't give up... the learning process of managing a forum and all the inherent problems is very valuable in the long run.
[edited by: dailypress at 6:54 am (utc) on July 23, 2009]
As of now I have: Threads: 57, Posts: 208, Members: 12
You/members do not seem to be very active in your board. That's only one post a day! In a half hour you/members should write at least six or ten posts.
If you need ideas for the opener post go to the homepage of your site or the best site in your niche or a mainstream news site and take a samll snippet of text and paste it as a new thread and the reply once or twice.
First I would SEO the forum to make it easier for Google to
index (This post is in the Google forum).
Is there a large desire for your forum niche?
What I would do is start a seperate site with good SEO about your subjects then post a link to the area of the forum to that subject and even start a blog and let the people who comment know that they can go into details about the subject on the forum subject page.
Use other forums and social media sites about the subjects on your forum to talk about and find unique ways to write to get those people to go to your forum for more discusion.
Study your stats on what key phrases people start finding you and build on those to build your forum.
I have quit the opposite problem. I have a few sites that do well and now I'm building forums and related blogs and can not keep up with all the daily signups and that can be a mess too. I was not prepared to have moderators other than myself so the forums are becomming a great pain. But I did find what niches people are willing to talk about.
All forums will have lurkers and that is a good thing because you have people interested in your niche.
I just woke up and starting to work on my forums and caught this thread so I don't know if I am making much sense.
But all I really know is make sure there is a demand for your forum. I would also not even use Adsense or any advertising until your forum takes off well.
But I did find what niches people are willing to talk about.
I know this is a difficult kind of thing to generalise but what have you found that people seem MORE interested in than not.
In my global industry there is realistically only one successful forum board (in the USA) and because the industry is quite tight-knit they all tend to know one another, help each other out etc. I'm sure it works well there since the physical distance between businesses is generally so big that even the closest ones are not considered competitors whereas within Europe nearly everyone is seen as a direct business competitor.
Maybe that's why my AdSense is higher-paying in Europe?
I removed all the forum boards off my trade widget directory site since, towards the end, companies were just spamming them with sales messages rather than trying to engage with potential buyers and sellers.
You/members do not seem to be very active in your board. That's only one post a day! In a half hour you/members should write at least six or ten posts.Yes, indeed. The fact that I dont have adsense on it discourages me to write more than 1 post a day! I will admit I have been lazy about this forum.
Study your stats on what key phrases people start finding you and build on those to build your forum.I have done that but currently the referral number is too low.
What I would do is start a seperate site with good SEO about your subjects then post a link to the area of the forum to that subject and even start a blog and let the people who comment know that they can go into details about the subject on the forum subject page.I like that! thanks.Use other forums and social media sites about the subjects on your forum to talk about and find unique ways to write to get those people to go to your forum for more discusion.
The niche topic is important: Can it generate passion? Does it require some knowledge levels? Is it of interest to a large number of lurkers?
One will get 10 to 100 lurkers for every thread and ONLY when something is said that strikes the need to reply in a lurker will they uncloak... see how easy it is... and if received well, will become another "monster poster".
My little niche forum has 85 members, 10 of whom post prodigiously... The forum has over 2000 threads (and growing) and my logs show several thousand readers each week. On average one or two of these readers become posters each month. Every six months I look at the membership and inactivate those who have not returned/posted for the 12 months prior, though that is not a necessary thing to do.
Obviously my little forum is nowhere near the size of WW, but it fills the niche for which it was created and brings traffic to the site.
About the only thing I can suggest is checking to make sure your site produces good urls that Google, Y! and Bing will like. If it is difficult to crawl, you might have difficulty in showing up!
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 4:40 pm (utc) on July 26, 2009]
