I've taken a look at a plethora of forums here and you all have a lot of members and posts.
How in the hell do you guys do it? I've tried Google Ads, Bing Ads, Giveaways on Facebook and now our forum contest and still don't have even close to the amount of traffic, posts and members that you guys do. FP is the only thing that has gotten me a few posts (Thanks, HotSpot) and I'm not sure what else to do?
Where do you see these successful forums? If you think that these forums are doing well, you haven't seen forums back in the day. There was so much more excitement, roar, and activity. 🙁
Always more content, that's the big secret. Large sites probably struggled to get started too. But once they got to a certain point they were able to start self-sustaining by members creating more of the content themselves. But to get to that point, staff needed to spend a TON of time creating topics and posting. (And then advertising.)
Advertising alone won't work. Sure it'll draw focus to your site. But what's the point if there is no content there to hold people's attention?
So having sections on your forum with 0's in them is a bad thing. That makes people think that your site is dead.
Though worse than that is if section(s) of your site gets loaded up with spam. (Like your Announcement section and DS section...) That will just cause people to flee faster because they think your site is dead and attracting spambots. So you'll need to clean those sections out, erase the spam and apply some anti-spam methods (EX- captcha to prevent spambot registration.)
I realize that I don't have a huge forum and generally don't know the first thing about advertising and whatnot, but there are a few things I think you should consider.
Community: It's very rare that people start forums from nothing. You need a base community. Sign up some friends. You seem to be running a gaming forum. If you play games online, try to get some people from the games to check out your forum.
Genre: You need to consider your genre. Gaming is extremely competitive due to the fact that there are already tons of gaming forums out there. If you wish to stick to a gaming genre, then you're going to need to find some ways to be really unique. If you can implement some features that other gaming forums don't have, that's a plus. Maybe you could create some unique content like walkthroughs and hints for popular games.
First Impressions: You need to consider the first impression that guests get when they view your site. Quite frankly, you don't have very many forums that have posts in them. You and your staff members need to fill the forums with content before you can start advertising. Members generally don't want to join sites that are bare. Get at least a few topics posted in each forum.
I definitely suggest making more topics! You have to have at least make three topics in each board before you start advertising, there are still boards on your forum that haven't been posted in.
If there is no content, most people will just look the other way and do something else, you have to gain their attention with topics that they may want to comment on.
To make your forum as it is now seem a bit more active, I recommend condensing your boards down and then once you have a bit of a base community, as others have mentioned, expand on the boards like you are now. Slowly but surely, with time taking its natural sweet self, it will grow 🙂 Just have fun with it.
