Forum Moderators: phranque
I have a website, address in sig, that is recieving about 500 unique visitors a day. I'm pretty proud of it because it has only been up for a month and I've not spent a penny on promotion (plenty of tips from here though!). Anyway, enough blowing of my own trumpet...
A great percentage of my visitors go to the site's message board, but I only have 18 registered users. Of those, 15 are folks that I invited personally (friends), staff or "system" users (admin etc).
People just don't seem to want to sign up. I've moved the registration and login box to the top of the page, started off many a discussion myself and have managed to get the forums listed in a few search engines as a seperate entity. I'm also a regular poster at a number of related forums and in newsgroups and always have the URL in my signature line.
We have 340 posts from our 18 members, so the talk is flowing well enough.
Can anyone give me any tips? Is there anything blatantly obvious that I'm missing?
All help appreciated greatly! :)
welcome to wmw !!
for me i have a monitor set to 600x800 and i have to scroll horizontally in your forums, that would irritate me.
Do they go through the whole site? How many visit the forum page? Do they read the posts? How many return within a day, within a week?
What I am getting at is, maybe:
A) Visitors are not finding what they want on your site (they don't come back, or don't go through the site, or both)
B)They are finding what they want, but the forums are not of interest to them (they go through the whole site, they come back, but they either don't look or don't linger on the forums)
C)Maybe you've got a lot of lurkers sitting on the sidelines waiting for a topic to push their hot button and get them to join (visitors come, they come back, they visit the forums multiple times).
I wonder how many new visitors come to Webmaster World every day versus how many new members sign up? I suspect its a pretty high ratio.
Your site looks great; I think some more info on visitor behavior will help you decide what you need to do (if anything:))
If you find that visitors are not reaching the forums, you may want to promote that section a little more prominently on your home page.
This is for May 2002:
Unique Visitors: 1300
Pageviews: 5400
Visits to forum directory: 440
Amount of times "viewtopic.php" was accessed: 400
Amount of times "viewforum.php was accessed: 370
Average visits to site: 1.4 (based on IP)
It looks to me like about a third of the visitors manage to reach the forums.
Is that a good percentage? I'm not sure. How would you suggest I promote the forums more on the frontpage?
It's in the navigational bar, also I have a small animated gif on the right that stands out quite a bit. On our reviews, we have a "Reviews Feedback" section which leads to the forums (like a comments system), and users can post anonymously. To be fair, I only finished coding that bit yesterday :)
Any suggestions?
Is it possibly that unique visitors are session, or hits.
Short Story
A prominent government related organization was extremely please about their visitation but couldn't quite figure out why no one would buy any online books.
200,000 unique visitors is per month is quite significant.
They had been using tracking software however, hits were confused with uniques visiors.
This dropped them down to about 10,000 sessions, which incidently turned out that 9,800 directly corresponded to the organization private intranet.
They were in fact averaging 4 - 6 unique (qualified) visitors a day.
And made more sense.
Anyway, no, that figure is not anything but Unique Visitors.
In my stats report (generated by AWStats from the raw logfiles), I have the following (for May, so far):-
Uniques: 1336
Number of Visits: 1878 (1.4 per visitor)
Pages: 5401
Hits: 65,113
Although last month was a slightly different story....
Uniques: 725
Visits: 1409 (1.94 visits per visitor)
Pages: 10603
Hits: 85,328
In the first 8 days of this month, I have beaten my last month's stats, but visits per person have dropped by 25%. Maybe due to more visitors? Not sure.
Thanks for all your responses so far, guys.
Also, you need to work HARD at establishing a personality for the community as a whole. This is tougher than it sounds because that personality has to evolve along with the board.
And, you're going to have to plant seed threads -something to form a nucleus.
There was a similar thread quite a while back, maybe 2/3 months ago. It was very similar to this topic and to my knowledge, was very useful and crammed with posts.
Perhaps if someone remembered the URL they could slide it in here
Brett’s of course excellent post on On Forum building and promotion [webmasterworld.com]
And I love this one started by Mike_Mackin Why is this different? [webmasterworld.com] – must have been one of his first posts ;) and now he’s a mod, plus other mods weigh in.
Here was one started by KG2RG
What does it take? what does it take to get 5,000 visitor's a day? [webmasterworld.com]
This one tedster started and chiyo and Marcia both offered excellent input. Bouncing Back [webmasterworld.com]
There are of course many more but I thought all these worth a revisit. I hope that captured the one you were looking for brotherhood of LAN.
While looking through these posts I was warmed by the sense of community we have here at Webmaster World. It’s certainly the place to start if you want to learn about community building. Makes perfect sense to learn from the best.
Lots of good tips there. I'll start putting some into practice right away.
Thank you again :)
