Hello Forum Promotion members,

This is the first of many monthly articles I will be writing giving my opinions in how the past month has been for the forum and what I am hoping for next month. Well I will start now with the forum does not look like it is going to reach 10,000 posts this month. I am a little disappointed with it but I am still confident of getting 100,000 posts before the end of 2008, which is the current target. We did hit another big milestone this month though by hitting 2000 members. I was really pleased when we finally hit it and it just shows how much the forum has grown. It also shows all the time and effort what staff and members have put into the forum is paying off and continuing to work. I would just like to thank everyone who has contributed to the forum and we wouldn’t be here if it was not for you, I probably would not be typing this blog post either. We have had quite a lot of staff resignations and changes recently. I was hugely disappointed when Travis (theezy) resigned from the community team. He was a good staff member and worked hard even when he was going through a bad time he put in his best. As you members may have noticed the packages are going through a bit of a crises at the moment and they keep have to close because of overloads. Carsonk recently appointed a Package Team Leader assistant, he chose TheExoticFish.com to take up this role. I hope they can work together to make sure that the packages don’t have to close every month because of an overload and I hope they can deliver the best packages for you. Someone who had a big impact on the team this month was Sbfc93. A lot of people question the decision to appoint him as package staff but I think the decision has paid off. He had an excellent start and he is a committed member who will try his hardest to complete as many packages, I would like to say well done to him. As for recent events we are thinking of a new contest to do for next month and are still discussing ideas for a new unique service to bring to you. I think overall this month has been a good one for the forum but was let down by a couple of minor things. I hope you enjoyed reading this and I look forward to the next month and lets hope we can take a bigger step to achieving the targets.

Thanks,
Efc2008.

One of the main things people forget when making and promoting their forum is guests.  Guests are what members start out like before they register.  It is important to keep this in mind when making your forum and promoting it as the site will have to be appealing of the people visiting won’t sign up.

One major thing people do is restrict the guest access.  That is fine to prevent them from seeing profiles, memberlist, who is online and posting posts and topics.  It is not good to hide all the forums from guests or restrict what they can see in the forums.  As a member your forum may look good with loads of forums and loads of good posts and content but how will the guests which are your future members see what your forum has to offer if the see a blank forum?

A few top tips:

• Open as many forums to guests to read as possible
• If you have a forum with content that you really don’t want guests to see such as downloads then make the forum visible but don’t give them permission to read the topics so they can see the forum exists and what topics there are but they can’t see the contents.  Or attach the downloads as attachments (if available) and not allow guests to download the attachments.
• If you have content that you don’t want guests or members to see hide it from view.  This is things like staff sections as there is nothing worse i think then going to a forum and seeing forums that 95% of people can’t enter.  You may as well make it hidden to everybody apart from staff.

This will make your forum more appealing to guests when you start promoting it and will increase the amount of members alot more then if you hide everything from guests.  If you have any more suggestions to get your forum more attractive for guests then post a comment below and i will add it into part 2.