How to get more visitors?

[pk698]

I think your topic is too broad. You look at all the big boards out there, they usually pertain to a niche. Start small, and grow a little at a time. Find some niche that you're interested in - ideally one that has little competition. There are many sites out there for everything, so it might be hard. But find some niche that you enjoy so it will be easier to add content (since you know more about it).

For your board, you can register dummy accounts and post/reply to your own post. Who'll know? and who'll care anyways if they don't know. Point is, you need content. If you're good at writing and BSing, then this part will be easy.

If you got the cash, then there's paid content creation sites.

You can also try to make a post about something popular so that the search engine can index it, and thus bring traffic to that particular post; thus getting you traffic. There are plenty of hot trends right now: obama 2012, iphone 5, justin bieber, and so on. Pick a keyword that you think will be searched a lot. then post about it, reply to it. Have friends post or reply to it. Fresh posts/content tends to be picked up by the search engine more often, thus getting your organic traffic. But once they come, keeping them there is another thing, and bringing them back is even harder. This again is well, very tough because your site is very broad. This is why finding a niche is a little easier because you know what to write about, you know what to focus your content on.

Also, add links to your site in your signature on forums you frequent. Tell friends, coworkers, classmates, family, spray paint your pet (I did this to my dog and let him ran around the neighborhood - NOT a good idea), post flyers in local shops or on local college campuses, twitter, facebook, spam craigslist, post on backpage.com,

The main thing is adding content that people want to read. I think content is easier to produce once you have a niche to focus on.

As someone said, it's not easy. Good luck.

 

[User]

so what you think I should do is maybe comment them out till my site gets bigger, as I put on the announcement that ads are disabled when people login or register : http://offtopicdiscussions.net/threads/updates-to-off-topic-discussions.5/

The ads have to go, there are no two ways about it, doesn't matter whether they disappear when people register. You will not get a second chance to make a good first impression and having a bunch of ads on a site that provides no content and no value to the user does not make a good first impression.

It's simple really; Imagine you would see a site like that as a user, someone else's site, would you register? No? Neither would I.

My suggestion is to formulate your value proposition into 140 characters. Use 140 characters or less to tell me what value I will receive from registering at your site and participating in its growth. Once you come up with your value proposition read it over and think about how you would react to it if a different site would tell you to spent what little free time you have on their site.

Test your value proposition with people you know, or heck even with people here though most people here are jaded forum vets who aren't going to be impressed with anything. As jaded forum vet I would like to join the choir that sings 'general discussion forums are likely to fail in today's marketplace'. If you can't find a topic that you are passionate about and build a community around that then it is highly unlikely that you will be successful. The Internet is full of noise, one more place where noise is generated will not stand out and isn't likely going to be used over established noise outlets.

 

[HannahP]

I make a good amount from selling adspace and it pays for hosting and other things.

Well, it's a question of philosophical differences, isn't it, whether you think the web is for advertising or communication. Those of us who were dicking around on the Internet before there was a world wide web tend to have different beliefs and ideas than people who have, for the most part, grown up with the web. Back in ye olden tymes there were even those who argued that the Internet shouldn't have any commercial use, if you can imagine that.

If you believe in something, and want to provide information about it and and gather information from the rest of the world, you certainly benefit from the interaction a forum provides. If you tell your users you will always be ad-free because you love them and don't want to exploit them, they will be loyal to you, and they will pay you back in a lot of ways that don't include clicking on an intrusive ad.

Information, information, information (free information) - that's what the Internet is a great, unparalleled platform for!

That and buying shoes. Which I also do.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

Those of us who were dicking around on the Internet before there was a world wide web tend to have different beliefs and ideas than people who have, for the most part, grown up with the web.

Yep... I remember performing the first basic old marketing techniques for clients back when it was just Windows 3.1, AltaVista ruled the Web along with doorpages. You searched dog, you got porn, you searched, mjp, you got porn, you searched Microsoft, you got porn.

Them were the days to what people assume now! I would say many even have resorted to the same beliefs as most teens... thinking they have an entitlement or right to a successful website, do little, earn heaps.

If you asked me this question in the early 90's, it would be simple. Now that there are billions of pages, often hundreds of thousands even fighting for some of the smallest of niches, all looking for prime position in Google... not so easy now and it requires real passion and dedication to build a quality site that grows organically.

Any monkey can install some forum software, spend an afternoon entering RSS feeds to replicate content into your site, signup to Google for ads and enter some cut and paste codes, then sit back and hope for the $$$... only to be right back here, asking this very question, HOW and WHY isn't it working.

If you want to succeed in building a reputable site, then spend a few weekends at the http://www.seobook.com and listen to what Aaron and his associates have to say. After you get past the initial reality shock of just how much work it will take you, if you are still committed, then in the coming years you will succeed.

I will even give you a further hint.... like mentioned above, DON'T put ads onto any brand new website that isn't built solely for such, which no forum is, and DON't use any type of automatic RSS feed to fill content in forums. DO, run a forum that you are passionate about and are knowledgeable about, and then instead of ads, use what most forum software have built within them nowdays, account upgrades to sell premium features. That is where you make money from forums without trashing them with advertisements, thus you don't ruin that first impression to the user.

Making money from a forum is done best through account upgrades... making money from ads is done best through blogging / automatic scraping and feeding sites, not forum software and/or, niche topic sites built purely to target x keyword phrases, and done so in the thousands, all marketed and listed in key locations across the web.

One slimline Google ad placement on a forum is enough for tapping that resource, if you must.

 

[Victor]

I will join and help you out will try and do some posting. I don't have anyone on mine either which does get a person down. I just try to keep trying and posting so I will register here tonight thanks for your site! I like the offtopic idea

 

[User]

Making money from a forum is done best through account upgrades...

I think this needs to be qualified. Account upgrades are a good way to get some cash flow early on but they are inherently limited by #1 the amount you can reasonably charge and #2 the percentage of users who will decide to upgrade.

I don't know of any forum that manages to sell account upgrades worth more than $25/user/year, and most forums I know sell $5-$10/user/year. I don't have good stats on how many members buy upgrades but my gut feeling is that it's unlikely to be more than 25% and I see that as a very optimistic number. It doesn't matter how large or small your forum is, you are not reaching 75% of your users (customers).

Most people don't actually hate ads per se, they hate ads which are intrusive and not relevant to them. I used to own a successful gaming forum and decided to add AdSense to it one day (already had thousands of users and 300+k posts at that point). I showed the ads to normal members and removed them from premium ($25/user/year) members' view. The revenue was about $100/month on I don't quite recall how many uniques. While $100/month may seem totally awesome to some, I felt that the amount of grief it created among normal users just wasn't worth it.

I dumped AdSense and signed up as affiliate of a virtual currency seller for the game the board was about. A single affiliate text-link was placed in an obvious area of the forum but was non-intrusive. My monthly revenue went from $100 via AdSense to $500/month from the affiliate link. There was some controversy about virtual currency sellers but far less than about AdSense and the controversy actually led to more users signing up to post their opinions.

Targeted advertising works for both, the users and the operator. Successful advertising informs the user of a product or service they want and directs them to a resource where they can obtain it while the operator gets a cut. Discarding ads for forums with a sweeping general statement like the one quoted above is a huge mistake and severely cuts the income potential of a forum.

Edit: These days Viglinks is a premier way to raise funds without to annoy the crap out of your users.

 

[Sadik B]

You have put very little effort in your site. Unfortunately if things stay the way they are, I don't see your site going anywhere.

 

[Walter]

Those of us who were dicking around on the Internet before there was a world wide web tend to have different beliefs and ideas than people who have, for the most part, grown up with the web. Back in ye olden tymes there were even those who argued that the Internet shouldn't have any commercial use, if you can imagine that.

I am such an old guy.

If you tell your users you will always be ad-free because you love them and don't want to exploit them, they will be loyal to you, and they will pay you back in a lot of ways that don't include clicking on an intrusive ad.

So show me your forum with hundreds or thousands of users online and please share how you finance it.

 

[Mark.B]

I'm going to sound harsh and I don't like doing that, but that site's going nowhere. I'd like to be able to be more sympathetic and nice about it but that isn't going to be fair because it's going to result in the site owner plugging away at something that isn't going to happen.

What you basically have here is a default XenForo installation plonked on the web with a bloody Google advert, and a list of forums like"Games", "Music", "Movies" with pretty much no content in any of them. And people are going to join up and suddenly start posting? never, never, never.

Quite apart from the fact that there are 1,649,732 "general discussion" forums on the web already, there is just no reason for anyone to sign up.

The front page tells me the site has been upgraded to have a portal to make it look professional.

As an end user my reaction might well be "Eh?".

But also as an end user that says to me:

1) You're more interested in tinkering with the site than actually running a community.
2) You've put some sort of page up. What's a "portal" to an end user? It's just internet jargon.
3) You're telling me that the site didn't used to be very professional because you've just made it so.

Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. You're not going to get anywhere doing that and it will sit there with no posts forever.

At the *very least* get a different style for it. Even if it's just different colours. I never look twice at sites with entirely default colour schemes. Show a little imagination there at least, but don't waste TOO much time on the style because you need to thoroughly revamp the entire concept and probably the whole domain name.

And posting competitions? Give me a break. You'll get hundreds of posts consisting of a smiley or "LOL", all from users you'll never see again. And even THAT is dependent on people actually bothering with the competition, which, unless you have some massively expensive stonking prize, nobody will, because you're overlooking the basic issue that you haven't got any members and as things stand nobody is going to bother joining, competition or otherwise.

Harsh, I know, but it has got to be said before you waste endless hours trying to make something work that, in its current form, won't.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

I think this needs to be qualified. Account upgrades are a good way to get some cash flow early on but they are inherently limited by #1 the amount you can reasonably charge and #2 the percentage of users who will decide to upgrade.

Yes and no... there are many methods to use account upgrades, and yes, I do agree, it also depends on the niche being managed. Like you said though, you can sell premium upgrades, on monthly / annual type basis, including features, etc...

This also comes into constantly improving your forum products to your users, to continually provide them new and interesting things, keeping them paying and/or coming back to post.

Yes, they are limited if your site is not growing exponentially every month... but if you have a forum that does this, you can make more when done correctly on the same size forum you have mentioned, than the ad money mentioned, and I have done this myself.

I will concur though, unless you have marketing experience, you will struggle with such concepts without that marketing knowledge on how to constantly appeal to your audience.

End point though... you have to be passionate about the topic and really build it with unique content via discussion. Without that interest, the forum is nothing. All the biggest forums owners started them due to passion... then that passion can be marketed and sold. Saying that, you can also crash them just as easily, just ask IB on how to achieve that.

I dumped AdSense and signed up as affiliate of a virtual currency seller for the game the board was about. A single affiliate text-link was placed in an obvious area of the forum but was non-intrusive. My monthly revenue went from $100 via AdSense to $500/month from the affiliate link.

Very excellent point, something I absolutely forgot to state. Targeted advertising is the best advertising... appeal to your audience and that is where money is made.

By doing nothing other than providing affiliate links to relevant books via Amazon, based on site and page topics, suddenly your peeling hundreds a month out of Amazon, just for keeping things targeted.

Nice post User... very valid comments.

 

[Victor]

I joined yesterday in hopes that I could help. I didn't realize that you haven't even posted anything since April 7 that is almost two months now. I will keep my end and post a few times a day for awhile, however, I have 6 sites that I have to take care of also. If I don't see you posting after awhile, I can't continue to going over there, I have other things to do which is basically nothing

 

[Kim]

Coulrophobia is an abnormal, irrational fear of clowns.

Maybe try changing your avatar, as well as all the excellent advice already offered here.

 

[x4rl]

I would ask anyone with ads on their site the same question: is the $1.12 you're raking in every month worth turning away potential users?

Thanks mjp I lol'd nice at that

To the OP am in the same boat my site is also dead. fun in it :/
Question is do you regret buying/making it yet?

 

[HannahP]

So show me your forum with hundreds or thousands of users online and please share how you finance it.

You're talking about 0.001% of forums. I was not. I was talking about about 99.999% of the people here. In other words, the vast, overwhelming majority of forums, those that are not businesses and never will be businesses.

Apples, oranges.

 

[rollthebones]

My forum only has 6K posts so my opinion probably isn't worth much, but the biggest problem is your niche. People post on forums to exchange information, not to talk about how their day was or what their favourite Batman character is. You need to think of a single topic that people will want to discuss and focus only on it. Scrap the whole "general discussion" thing and start over with a new domain.

 

[Mikey]

I would ask anyone with ads on their site the same question: is the $1.12 you're raking in every month worth turning away potential users? I can only speak for myself, but I would leave a "general discussion" forum that put ads in my face before I'd even take a look around.

That's exactly why I've clicked the link in his sig a few times, and then closed the tab. ads right in my face, no content. looks like he's just out to make money ..

 

[Dark Matter]

I'm going to sound harsh and I don't like doing that, but that site's going nowhere. I'd like to be able to be more sympathetic and nice about it but that isn't going to be fair because it's going to result in the site owner plugging away at something that isn't going to happen.

What you basically have here is a default XenForo installation plonked on the web with a bloody Google advert, and a list of forums like"Games", "Music", "Movies" with pretty much no content in any of them. And people are going to join up and suddenly start posting? never, never, never.

Quite apart from the fact that there are 1,649,732 "general discussion" forums on the web already, there is just no reason for anyone to sign up.

The front page tells me the site has been upgraded to have a portal to make it look professional.

As an end user my reaction might well be "Eh?".

But also as an end user that says to me:

1) You're more interested in tinkering with the site than actually running a community.
2) You've put some sort of page up. What's a "portal" to an end user? It's just internet jargon.
3) You're telling me that the site didn't used to be very professional because you've just made it so.

Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. You're not going to get anywhere doing that and it will sit there with no posts forever.

At the *very least* get a different style for it. Even if it's just different colours. I never look twice at sites with entirely default colour schemes. Show a little imagination there at least, but don't waste TOO much time on the style because you need to thoroughly revamp the entire concept and probably the whole domain name.

And posting competitions? Give me a break. You'll get hundreds of posts consisting of a smiley or "LOL", all from users you'll never see again. And even THAT is dependent on people actually bothering with the competition, which, unless you have some massively expensive stonking prize, nobody will, because you're overlooking the basic issue that you haven't got any members and as things stand nobody is going to bother joining, competition or otherwise.

Harsh, I know, but it has got to be said before you waste endless hours trying to make something work that, in its current form, won't.

You run general discussion forum, so are contradicting yourself.

 

[Mark.B]

You run general discussion forum, so are contradicting yourself.

Yes, I run a very successful one that has been online ten years.

And, it's not a "General Discussion Board in the true sense of the word, because people who like General Discussion Boards in general, so to speak, probably won't like mine.

 

[Carlos]

For your board, you can register dummy accounts and post/reply to your own post. Who'll know? and who'll care anyways if they don't know. Point is, you need content. If you're good at writing and BSing, then this part will be easy.

I have seen websites prosper with this tip alone. I have seen 2 niche websites flourish to the top search engines rankings because of this tactic. Those two websites were sold for 10k and 20k respectively. But in today's marketplace, I don't think that this will work.

Google is currently cracking down on "content farms" so bad, that it will be next to impossible for new sites to rank higher unless you purchase a bigger forum or stumble across a database large enough to make a buck.

I will even give you a further hint.... like mentioned above, DON'T put ads onto any brand new website that isn't built solely for such, which no forum is, and DON't use any type of automatic RSS feed to fill content in forums. DO, run a forum that you are passionate about and are knowledgeable about, and then instead of ads, use what most forum software have built within them nowdays, account upgrades to sell premium features. That is where you make money from forums without trashing them with advertisements, thus you don't ruin that first impression to the user.

Making money from a forum is done best through account upgrades... making money from ads is done best through blogging / automatic scraping and feeding sites, not forum software and/or, niche topic sites built purely to target x keyword phrases, and done so in the thousands, all marketed and listed in key locations across the web.

I'm sorry, but I am going to disagree with this. A forum can have ads and be very successful.

Just as long as you put your mind, your talent, your skils, to good use....Those impressions will add up especially, especially if you run a network of websites to facilitate traffic to that forum.

I agree that the OP's topic is very broad, so that means there's no "focus." No niche. But you can find a forum's niche if your forum is broad. I know several forums prosper even though that its a broad topic - These forums banked on one niche to bring in the "flavor" to the forum.

Put it this way, I own MVC3Forum, I am using a niche that doesn't have much of a market for a forum. Against a niche like Call of Duty. Yet, the site prospered and ranked so high on google and yahoo so much, that the more I marketed on twitter, and facebook, the more traffic I get. And then, when the niche starts to wind down, it keeps getting traffic without me marketing it at all! AT ALL. Nothing.

I placed the ads right at the beginning of the forum's birth. No waiting. Nah.

 

[jonsidneyb]

I am not sure what the forum is about, can a forum work being 100% off topic? I really don't know.