Having trouble with promoting my forum,

[nathanielrsuchy]

Is anyone able to help provide advice on promoting my forum. I'm having difficulties. I've done the following:

* Invite friends on forums and skype to join my forum.
* Posted a give-away
* Put my profile link as my forum link
* Setup good on page SEO
* Put a lot of free and useful content in private sections on my forum (linked and said register to view content)

I'm unsure what to do to gain more traffic. It's frustrating. Does anyone here have good ideas / can anyone here help me do better promotion? (without investing $100s to do so)?

 

[John]

I'll first say that the DDoS protection is very annoying. If I happened to come across your forum and I wasn't giving your advice, I'd leave right when I saw it. In addition - while some of your forums are fairly active, others barely have any life in them at all. The whole "Marketplace" category isn't very active at all, and I'd honestly consider removing that completely, or at least trimming some of the categories down some.

When it comes to promotion -- there really is no "golden egg". You just need to promote in as many places as you can, over and over until you get a few members.

 

[MasterA]

I think the important thing is to give guests a reason to join. Therefore, you need something unique or something that members want. I can see that you have a $250 contest; you need to advertise that everywhere you can because people will be interested. It is also important that you work on your SEO as that gets you lots of organic traffic. Unfortunately, you probably will have to invest money to get more traffic as the market is very competitive these days.

 

[nathanielrsuchy]

I'll first say that the DDoS protection is very annoying. If I happened to come across your forum and I wasn't giving your advice, I'd leave right when I saw it. In addition - while some of your forums are fairly active, others barely have any life in them at all. The whole "Marketplace" category isn't very active at all, and I'd honestly consider removing that completely, or at least trimming some of the categories down some.

When it comes to promotion -- there really is no "golden egg". You just need to promote in as many places as you can, over and over until you get a few members.

On the DDOS Protection Screen: If I wasn't getting attacked 3 times a day and being sent threats by someone in another country that screen wouldn't be there. I simply don't have a choice. And we will work on filling the marketplace.

 

[nathanielrsuchy]

I think the important thing is to give guests a reason to join. Therefore, you need something unique or something that members want. I can see that you have a $250 contest; you need to advertise that everywhere you can because people will be interested. It is also important that you work on your SEO as that gets you lots of organic traffic. Unfortunately, you probably will have to invest money to get more traffic as the market is very competitive these days.

Yeah the whole investing money is the difficult part. The contest has money from a donor. But beyond that I'm unsure what to do to gain the traffic. Would https://majestic.com/reports/site-explorer?folder=&q=https://envy.zone&IndexDataSource=F reflect that I've done good setting up SEO?

 

[John]

I'll first say that the DDoS protection is very annoying. If I happened to come across your forum and I wasn't giving your advice, I'd leave right when I saw it. In addition - while some of your forums are fairly active, others barely have any life in them at all. The whole "Marketplace" category isn't very active at all, and I'd honestly consider removing that completely, or at least trimming some of the categories down some.

When it comes to promotion -- there really is no "golden egg". You just need to promote in as many places as you can, over and over until you get a few members.

On the DDOS Protection Screen: If I wasn't getting attacked 3 times a day and being sent threats by someone in another country that screen wouldn't be there. I simply don't have a choice. And we will work on filling the marketplace.

Have you thought about putting your forum behind CloudFlare?: https://www.cloudflare.com/. There are some issues with configuration sometimes; however, if you set it up correctly, it would be far more efficient than the DDoS screening you have right now.

 

[nathanielrsuchy]

I'll first say that the DDoS protection is very annoying. If I happened to come across your forum and I wasn't giving your advice, I'd leave right when I saw it. In addition - while some of your forums are fairly active, others barely have any life in them at all. The whole "Marketplace" category isn't very active at all, and I'd honestly consider removing that completely, or at least trimming some of the categories down some.

When it comes to promotion -- there really is no "golden egg". You just need to promote in as many places as you can, over and over until you get a few members.

On the DDOS Protection Screen: If I wasn't getting attacked 3 times a day and being sent threats by someone in another country that screen wouldn't be there. I simply don't have a choice. And we will work on filling the marketplace.

Have you thought about putting your forum behind CloudFlare?: https://www.cloudflare.com/. There are some issues with configuration sometimes; however, if you set it up correctly, it would be far more efficient than the DDoS screening you have right now.

Not to be rude but tell me your joking. The DDOS screen literally says "DDoS protection by CloudFlare". The type of attack though requires that specific type of screening to stop. And it's super annoying but due to threats received and attacks made it's my only option. Sorry if I seem irritated it's not at you but over my whole situation in general.

 

[cpvr]

Is anyone able to help provide advice on promoting my forum. I'm having difficulties. I've done the following:

* Invite friends on forums and skype to join my forum.
* Posted a give-away
* Put my profile link as my forum link
* Setup good on page SEO
* Put a lot of free and useful content in private sections on my forum (linked and said register to view content)

I'm unsure what to do to gain more traffic. It's frustrating. Does anyone here have good ideas / can anyone here help me do better promotion? (without investing $100s to do so)?

When you launched your giveaway, did you actively promote about this anyhwere on the internet? What was the prize for this giveaway though? I'm not entirely sure where your "Good on page" seo is implemented because from my first look at your forum, I noticed that there's not much content on your index.

For example

Welcome To Envy!
Come conversate! We are very inviting and would love if you register.

This is actually low quality content, you should write a much longer and in-depth description for your online community. A page that has good seo always contains keywords, links to inner pages, header tags and a great title/meta description to back the page's seo up. I've been doing seo for as long as I can remember and right now, your forum doesn't has good seo and is actually very lackluster. Please read this blog post about seo. https://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors

I've personally never been a huge fan of putting content in a private forum and I think it's relatively stupid to do this. Especially since there's no way your private content can be ranked or indexed on all the search engines, so if these are quality topics, then they deserve to be available to the public. Hiding content isn't really a great idea and plus, you'll just attract new members that'll join just to see your private forum, then they'll stop visiting as soon as they read everything that's private. If anything, private content should be available for supporters.

Are you promoting on reddit, twitter, facebook or tumblr yet? If you're not, then you should start.

 

[MasterA]

I think the important thing is to give guests a reason to join. Therefore, you need something unique or something that members want. I can see that you have a $250 contest; you need to advertise that everywhere you can because people will be interested. It is also important that you work on your SEO as that gets you lots of organic traffic. Unfortunately, you probably will have to invest money to get more traffic as the market is very competitive these days.

Yeah the whole investing money is the difficult part. The contest has money from a donor. But beyond that I'm unsure what to do to gain the traffic. Would https://majestic.com/reports/site-explorer?folder=&q=https://envy.zone&IndexDataSource=F reflect that I've done good setting up SEO?

Finding investors is a good way to grow a website if are having difficulties financially. My advice for you is to find a partner who can finance the website or find more donors although it may be hard. You really need to advertise that $250 content everywhere. This is a great opportunity for you to grow your forum. Aim at students if possible, $250 is a lot for students and they will work hard for it.

Based on the results from Majestic, there are a few things you need to do. Firstly, it says page title is N/A which means they cannot read your page title or you don't have one. This is bad for your SEO. Secondly, you really need to start building backlinks, 35 external backlinks is not enough. When I type in Envy Zone on google, I see your website on the first page which is good but this may not be a very popular search term. You should try to rank key words related to your niche like "General Discussion Forum" because this has more searches. The way I measure my SEO is to compare it with my competitiors. I compare SERP (Search Engine Results Page), backlinks and SEO scores with my competitors and try to beat them. This is a useful tool for comparing SERP for different keywords: https://www.serplab.co.uk/. You can find SEO tools that give you SEO scores on Google. I haven't used any recently so I can't recommend one at the moment. In today's market, you need to beat your competitors on search engines and get that number 1 spot for as many keywords as possible. A few other tips I can give you based on my experience is have a mobile friendly website and high load speed. These factors now play an important role on SEO.