Basic Review
Site Name: Promotion Shock
Site Type: Advertising/Webmaster Forum
Age: 13 weeks
Appearance
So much has changed since my last visit to Promotion Shock. I noticed you changed the forum software from IPB to XenForo now. For the appearance, the overall theme is quite a popular, commonly-used theme. I noticed you used the blue version; I have seen the red version before. Since competition in this niche is hard, being as unique and different as you can becomes important. One of the ways to do this is to get a more customized theme. I don't know anything about codes, but if you want to stick to this theme you can tweak the codes to make it look different, change background, combine more colors, and so on.
The header feels rather empty. You have such a large space but you didn't even use half of it. Perhaps centering the banner, add pictures/icons, use other fonts, and more colors will help to make it not so empty. I must say I can't really relate the icon you used at the banner with the idea of advertising forum. Try to brainstorm another idea; you can use it for favicon too. (P.S.: This can be a good idea for a forum contest for activity boost!) For the body of the forum, I pretty much like it. Good idea using different icons for each category/forum. I think I have seen those affiliate image before with your IPB skin; now it doesn't match the new theme. One thing I noticed as a guest I could see VIP section, though I couldn't as a member, and the category/forum icon is still the theme's standard. The sub-forums too, I noticed not all of them have customized icons like some others do. You would have to fix the icons and the permission.
Layout
For forum layout I don't think there are big problems. I think all has been placed properly to match the need of advertising/webmaster forum. One thing which made me wonder is a section named "Extra Promotion" in Promotion & Services category. There you have sub-forums for featured website and footer advertising. I don't see why you would have to put them as sub-forums; you can just let them become a stand-alone forum like packages or reviews section. Unless the reason is because they are still offline.
Statistics and Activity
Promotion Shock has a total of 3,310 posts and 119 members after the merge. The rate of posts per member is almost 28 posts, and you made around 250 posts per week. I think those are quite nice numbers. Looking deeper into the numbers, your staff members made around 55% of the total posts. There is a huge gap between the two administrators and the rest of staff members, as well as with the next member with highest post count. I must say I was surprised when I saw one of staff members only have 2 posts. This imbalance will need to be fixed. You may have not so good statistics due to the forum crash a while ago and after the merge, so you will need to pump activity real hard since you have already got a good base there. Ask for cooperation from your staff members to reply and start conversation. Engage with members to create a lovely community.
Content
Since Promotion Shock's niche is a very saturated one, it is probably can't be helped to find similar threads in most of those forums. Your forum included. I looked into your general webmaster discussion forum, and there doesn't seem to be too many new threads in the latest week. What you need now is new, interesting topics, regularly. The last word is important. Especially since you have just merged a forum to yourself; getting members to 'know' this new forum may take a while, and content is one way to get them interested and continue posting. New ideas may be hard to find. At times it can just come out randomly. Other solution will be to read threads at similar forums, recycle the idea (not completely copying it), and use it on your own forum.
Grammar wise, I don't see any problems. I see good grammar in forum description and posts. Keep this up. Similar to what I mentioned in my last review for you, perhaps unique names for each of your section can spark up more interest since you used such common words.
Organization and SEO
Using 'promotion shock' on Google, your forum came as the first result. On Yahoo it didn't show your forum, though. For other keywords, the result was not yet very good as none came up. Google Page Rank is still 0. Alexa Page Rank is 743,890 with 20 links. I looked at them and it was good that there were quite many other advertising forums you have linked yourself in. Browse more and enlarge this list for better exposure to the correct target audience of your forum. You may also want to have a sitemap for better improvement of SEO.
Words from the Reviewer
I believe you have known the difficulties in building an advertising/webmaster forum, given how saturated this niche is. This gives you a heavy task in customizing your site to be different and thus inviting: starting from appearance until deep down the content. It takes time to grow strong, so keep on doing your best and brainstorm ideas as many as you can. One thing you may want to do is 'field study', by discussing it with fellow webmasters and visiting various similar forums to get a better hold of what this niche is actually like. I wish you all the best!
Star Rating
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