Hi,
I've looked through other posts and quite a few people asking how to get more traffic etc and my questions is along the lines..
Bit of background on the site..
I own mail order business with website selling computer components etc, traffic is building up quite well, paying for traffic with shopping.com/froogle/google adswords/pricerunner and more so traffic to the site/orders is fine and we are working on adding mass product reviews/photos/help guides etc but is huge task.
I am wanting to open a forum for people to chat on, this would be seperate from t he main site and wouldnt contain adverts or be anyway used as selling tool, only idea behind it is to get people interested in computers on our site which contains the forum, I dont need to make direct revenue from it.
The traffic is fairly low to the site on average 300 to 500 unique hits a day but it's quality traffic most paid for from per click ads, but I dont want to have a link on the main site which points to a forum with hardly anyone using it.
I can list loads of ecommerce sites which have a forum on and no one has posted for months or has very few posts which i think doesnt look good at all for people looking over your site to buy and who is going to post in a forum when the last post was 5 months ago.
I know its upto the site owner to keep posting in etc but i cant keep talking to myself or other staff in it, i need real people posting real posts.
So my question is...how can i get the traffic in and regular members?
Or is my only option to put it on the site, and then increase site traffic 10x and then with more site traffic some more will use the forum? As the traffic is all paid for and bit via search engines etc i'd struggle to do that in a short period of time.
Did think about paying people to post, say 1p per unique post. max 5 a day, do it for month or so, but that wouldnt give me any more members if i stopped paying per post after a month or two.
Forgot to add, i also ideally need most of it being UK traffic.
Thanks for any help!
Busy posted this at 10:17 — 5th March 2006.
He has: 6,157 posts
Joined: May 2001
Forget the forums, like you said dead forums look bad for the site.
To get people to buy you need to sell elsewhere (seems weird I know), but we all have to start somewhere. Sell on ebay for example and when you send people email youd have your site at the bottom of the email, and offer a second cheaper from the site or something.
Every email you send, even if it's to yourself should have your sites sell in the signature of the email.
)
Lots of places to advertise (dont spam), your signature on here for example, join the TWF community, and the more interest you show the more your signature shows, the more people will see it. Again do not spam, and do not abuse this opertunity (yeah I spell funny
Buying traffic will get expensive.
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Megan posted this at 16:22 — 5th March 2006.
She has: 10,304 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
I think adding more content would be better than adding a forum. Forums take a lot of work to run on a day-to-day basis, and even more at the beginning when you're trying to get members. It would be easier to create some content on your topic. Unique, quality reviews will be attractive to people. YOu could even try free article repositories a quick content boost. The best part of this is that it gives you more content for search engines to crawl, and therefore more opportunities to get visitors to your site.
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aboyd posted this at 01:17 — 29th March 2006.
They have: 33 posts
Joined: Nov 2004
Having some experience here, I can recognize that Megan has some experience here. It might be worth listening to her advice.
I run multiple forums, and they eat up a shocking amount of time, even a year after launch. How much? So much that it eats into my freelance projects -- I end up working on my forums for free/fun, while paying customers ask me if I can give them more attention.
Forums are like cats -- finicky. They can go strong for a while, and if you look away, they can disappear. So you end up putting in more time, to get it back. Rinse & repeat.
Creating content (tutorials, how-to's, reviews) is painful up front as you work on the creation. And it's painful medium-term too, as you don't typically get a lot of feedback. (I find a lot of people looking to do forums are really looking to create something that will generate lots of positive feedback for their efforts.) But long-term, tutorials & reviews have far more of a payoff. You put in a little time, and people come around to read it for years afterward. The text you write never gets "moody," never asks to be removed from the site, never stops working.
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yetanotherfcw posted this at 10:48 — 16th March 2006.
They have: 30 posts
Joined: Mar 2006
I already mentioned in some other thread, but if you're very serious about this, then you can do one of the followings:
1. 1-on-1 post exchange
2. Join in post exchange group(s)
3. Pay someone to do 1, 2 or both
Regardless of how you do it, it's a time consuming task.
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Nikolas posted this at 14:28 — 21st March 2006.
He has: 20 posts
Joined: May 2005
I agree with all of your opinions.
I will just add a golden rule about forums.
People don't post in empty/inactive forums. I have seen that with my webmaster forum. When it started it had some valueable traffic from my other webmaster related sites, but very few sign ups.
Now the site has some activity, and a better number of posts (about 7000) and the sign ups have been raised a lot. I guess that as the post count grows, the sign up ratio grows too.
So my advice is to keep paying people to post/trade posts untill your site gets some real interest.
And also have in mind contests. Contests can give you many loyal members.
Hope I helped
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locatepeople posted this at 16:46 — 30th March 2006.
He has: 377 posts
Joined: May 2005
have a forum but optimise it for new keywords, i.e. if your website's keyword is "buy computers" your forum keyword could be "buy computers forum" etc and get some traffic from the SEs.
Do you have a mailing list of previous customers? You could contact them to ask to put reviews on the forum. that way it'd be a sort of feedback forum and very useful for marketing.
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Telemicus posted this at 20:59 — 31st March 2006.
He has: 31 posts
Joined: Dec 2004
You could promote your forum (if you are still interested in having one!) to your regular and new customers possibly by giving something away for signing up and posting - say 25% discount, free shipping. This has roped me in once before - mind you I have not posted their since.
Anyway, all forums start from nothing but I agree they are probably much harder to promote than a basic site.
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