It’s time to think outside the box. Most of the promotion we do to our forum is purely online. But, how do you know that you don’t share the same interests with people who live in your own home town/city? I have devised a small list to help you promote your forum with out with the internet.

Mouth to Mouth

The easiest method of promoting is actually telling people that you have a forum. If you owned a football forum most likely you may go and watch and support your local team. Tell your fellow supporters that you own a forum that is related to football and ask if they would be interested in joining and talking about football. You could gain a few extra members.

Local Newspaper Ad

Try advertising in your local newspaper. Getting advertisement spots is really easy but sometimes can be a bit expensive. In the end I think it is worth it because if you can get that extra member it will create that extra bit of activity and could be the decider if the next visitor will want to join as a member or not.

On a Local Radio Show

Not a popular method of marketing simply because of the amount of people who have abandoned the radio but if you can get your ad called out in rush hour traffic then you could receive a fair bit of traffic. This method will really depend in what niche your forum is set up in.  For exmaple I don’t think this method would work in role playing forums.

Business Cards

Create a few hundred business cards and ask for them to be put up in related shops. For example, if you own a music forum why don’t you head down to your local music store and ask the shop keep if he can put your business card up on the till or somewhere else visible to the customer.

Clothing and Merchandise

Create your own branded T-shirts and hats and wear them about. Have your URL clearly visible on the front and back. You may not blend into the crowd but is that really a bad thing You could get a bit of traffic from this method.

What’s Your Say?

Do you have any more methods of promoting you forum out with the internet? Do you think it’s possible to promote effectively without the internet? Post below I would love to hear your thoughts.

Twitter has become a great source of traffic for quite a few websites, especially forums. In order to receive the maximum benefits from twitter you need as many natural followers as you can.

Natural followers are followers that follow you at will and are not following you just because you followed them, paid them or have used some black hat trick ect. Natural followers are more inclined to read your tweets and click your links and that’s why we want them.

I have included some tips below on how to twitterise your forum to the max and gain more natural followers.

Add a Twitter “Follow Me” Image to Your Forum

Having a little twitter icon somewhere in your forum layout is a great way of attracting new twitter followers. It’s shows your members and visitors that you have twitter and most likely most if not all of your followers will come from this button.  The main idea behind this is advertising that you use twitter.

Make Your Twitter Image Web 2.0

Make your Twitter image interactive. When hovering over it make it move, dance or hide ect. Be creative. Everyone loves a forum that is unique and creative.

Create an Announcement in Your Forum

If you have an announcement forum, create a thread in there and announce that you have twitter for your forum. You could even create a forum announcement via the ModCP and have it appear in all your board’s forums. Again, the main point is to give your twitter link exposure and show your members that you have twitter.

Be Active in Twitter

Being active is another great way to attract followers. Nobody likes an inactive twitter account. In order to get traffic from Twitter you have to create it. That means post regular tweets on updates on the forum and posting threads from your forum ect

What’s Your Say?

Twitter is all about showing a personal side while promoting your forum. Once you find the balance you are set for a steady stream of traffic.

Do you use twitter to promote your forum? How do you advertise you use twitter? Post below I would love to hear.

Be sure to add @successfulForum

Increasing Traffic, one of that hardest tasks of a forum administrator. I know it was for me. So I have listed five more possible ways to increase traffic to your forum.

Banner Advertisement

Have you tried creating a banner for your board and paying for it to be displayed on somebody else website. This can be a great way to increase traffic to your site as it is another gateway to your board.

Make sure that you banner is appealing and not distracting. That it has a call for action on it and that you are putting it on a site that it’s worth putting it on. You don’t want to put it on a site that only gets 100 visits a month because the chances of it getting clicked are very slim. Look for a popular website.

Make an Announcement on Forums You Already Own

If you already own a community a great way to direct your users to your newly created forum is create an announcement. Obviously the two boards have to be closely related in order for the users to stay. Create an announcement and say something along the lines of

“Hey, I’ve just created a new forum. It’s about gardening. Click here to go to it”

Make sure you create a description and a link so that people know where they are going.  Depending on the forum size you could get a nice bundle of traffic from it.

Blog Commenting

Blog Commenting is another great way to increase traffic to your forum. It is very simple. You find blog posts, you read the articles, you then post a relevant comment to that article. The more relevant your comment is the more chances your link will be clicked. Also I also noticed that if you are one of the first commenter’s on that post then you will receive a higher number of clicks.

Search Engines Organic

Search engines in my opinion is the best way to increase traffic. Several hundred million phrases are searched a day and we need to be apart of that. In order to get the most from our boards we need to SEO (Search engine optimize).

Basic Search engine fundamentals are:

• Getting back links
• Interlinking
• Keyword friendly URL’s
• A good descriptive title
• A good meta description

75% of my forum’s traffic comes from search engines.

Guest Posting on Other Blogs

Guest posting in other blogs involves you writing articles related to that blog. Beware, blog owners will not let you write any crap so it’s good to do a bit of research on blogging and how to properly structure your posts. You will usually get a link back to your board and that’s where the traffic will come from.

Just remember take your time to build the post and do some research on the subject.  Another great method to increase traffic if used effectively.

What’s Your Say?

Have you ever tried these methods of getting traffic? Do you have any methods of increasing traffic to your forum? Post a comment below we love to hear from you!

In a SEO post I made a while back I recommended a plug-in for vBulletin called VBSEO.  VBSEO handles all the SEO for your vBulletin forum when installed.  It is proven to dramatically increase your search engine traffic and is regarded as a truly world class product but the bad thing is it comes in at $149. Now, I am going to tell you why I chose this product.

Keyword Friendly URL’s

Keywords in the URL is proven to enhance your chances of ranking better in major search engines and this is supported by VBSEO. Search engines are supposed to read keyword URL’s better. A keyword URL looks like this http://successfulforum.com/this-is-a-keyword-url.html compared to your usual forum structure of a URL, http://successfulforum.com/showthread.php?t=154373.

Custom 404 Page Support

Custom 404′s always add a nice touch to the website. You can always add links to your most popular threads or forums or even create a search engine top help your users find what they are looking for after clicking a broken link. This will dramatically decrease the bounce rate and you will not see as much user’s leaving your forum after hitting a 404.

Basic Segmentation Tracking

One of my favourite features of VBSEO is the basic Segmentation. This allows you too add more functionality to your Google Analytics. Basic Segmentation divides your guests and members into individual groups and allows you to track their activity on Google Analytics. This will help you keep your forum at it’s up most activity and also let you find weakness on your forum which you can build upon.

Full Pingback/Trackback/Refback System

Like WordPress, the blog software I am using just now, VBSEO will add a full pingback/Trackback system to your forum. This means when someone links to your forum, the forum is pinged and you are notified that they are linking to you. This could be could because if you see a lot of links coming from the one site you could optimize and maybe put banner advertisement on that persons site or focus on generating more traffic from that site because the users coming from that site like your content.

More Features of the VBSEO plug-in can be found here.

What’s Your Say?

Do you use this plug-in? Do You like it? Do you think it’s a load of crap? What’s you opinion? I would love to hear it.

From the dawn of time people have been creating competitions. From newspapers to airline companies everyone does it.  Well guess what…so can a forum administrator.  A competition is a great way to bind a community together and get things clicking on your forum. In a previous blog post I talked about how a competition promotes activity but in this blog post I am going to dig a little bit deeper why a competition is good for you.

Did I See Those Traffic Stats Increase

The main reason why people usually host a competition is to promote activity and traffic. A competition will spur things up and get everyone’s blood going. A phase of excitement will go buzz through the forum. Word will spread from one mouth to another and you will see your traffic stats increase, increase and increase.

It Lets Your User’s Do The Promotion

Some forums tend to host competition’s that result in the winner being the one who spreads the word the most. What do I mean by that? Well lets say that I have a twitter. To enter the competition I could say you have to follow my twitter account and re-tweet my blog posts for at least a week. The person who re-tweets the most wins a prize. In turn this will increase your activity and traffic stats again, broadening your visibility circle.

Give Away Something Useful

The whole point of a competition is to give away something useful, something which is valuable to a user. Something that costs money. For example, I might have a football forum. In the competition I might want to give two tickets to a football match or even a signed shirt. The more valuable the prize is the more traffic you should expect.

There Should Be More Than One Winner

Don’t just give away a prize for first place have a prize for second, third and may be fourth aswell. The reason behind this is if a member of your forum is one of six thousand active members then they will think the chance of them winning is close to zero therefore not enter but if you have a second, third and fourth place their chances have increased therefore making them more likely to enter.  They don’t mind not coming in first they would just like to receive a prize.  As upfront as that may sound, it is true.

Wrapping It Up

You should try to have as many competitions as often as you can as it is a great way to promote activity and increase traffic. More importantly it brings loyal visitors to your forum by binding your forum together therefore creating a better community experience.

What is Forum SEO? Well it’s just like any other SEO except you are focusing it on your forum. Search Engine Optimization is improving the quality of traffic from search engines i.e google to your forum. In this blog post I am going to name a few plug-ins for various forum software’s to help improve your forum’s SEO.

VBulletin – vBSEO

vBSEO is the best plug-in for vBulletin’s software. The amount of work this plug-in does is extraordinary. It does all the SEO work for you. From meta description’s to keyword urls it does the works.  A post created by Darren Rowse talks about how much vBSEO improved his quality of traffic and how it increased traffic in general to his forum. This is a great plug-in and should be bought by all vBulletin software owners. You all must be thinking where is the catch, well it comes at $195 a pop. Very expensive but still a must have for any vBulletin owners

If you don’t have that kind of money to splash out on your forum then make sure you have a site map created and submitted to google. Also turn on SEO friendly urls. That should increase your SEO.

MyBB – Google SEO

The best forum SEO plug-in for MyBB I have found, which is part of my must have plug-ins for MyBB is Google SEO. This plug-in takes care of url’s, sitemaps, redirections, custom404′s and meta descriptions. A must have plug-in for MyBB users.  This will improve your forum SEO dramatically. MyBB users will be happy to know that this plug-in is free.

PHPBB3 – PHPBB SEO

The best PHPBB3 forum SEO mod I found was PHPBB-SEO. This mod does everything related to forum SEO for a PHPBB3 forum. From descriptions to SEO friendly urls, you name it. A great mod for all PHPBB3 users.

SMF – Pretty URL’s

The best SMF forum SEO mod I found was Pretty Link’s. Unfortunately it only creates SEO friendly urls which will improve SEO just a bit. But hey, some is better than none.  I am not a SMF user so  I’m not so much up to date with the mods/plug-ins available to SMF users, if there is a better SMF plug-in I would love to hear about it.

Wrapping It Up

Search Engine Optimization is an importing part of running a forum. I gets you free natural targeted traffic from search engines which in turn could turn into more membership for your forum as these people have not stumbled across your site accidental.  They have came because you have search engine optimized your forum.

Do you use different plug-ins SEO plug-ins for your forum? Do you use different methods to improve the SEO of your forum? Post a comment I would love to hear from you.

All the best,
Glen

Running a Successful Forum

Getting traffic is a really hard task, something that takes a lot of time, patience and dedication but if you really stick to it you will make it happen.  You will find most of your traffic will come from the search engine but in this post I am going to list five different ways to increase your traffic.

Social Networks

Social networks is the new internet. Millions and millions of people use social networks to keep their friends updated with what they are doing. We, forum administrators need to take advantage of this.

Creating twitter and FaceBook pages is a great way to keep your readers and followers up to date with the latest discussions in your forums. Take twitter as an example. If you can tweet your most popular discussions, if your followers like that discussion they might retweet it.  Therefore sending that discussion out even further, creating a bigger circle.  Of of his followers might say, “Hey, I find that interested I am going to check it out.”.  There you go you have just received a visitor by tweeting.  Of course the more followers you have the bigger the circle is.

Remember there are other Social networks such as FaceBook and Youtube, so keep your readers up to date their aswell.

Back links From Related Forums

This method has to be used with caution.  What I mean by that is you can’t just go to other people’s forums and spam them with a link to your forum, that is very unethical.  Think about it, would you like that done to you?  What I mean by getting a back link from a related forum is by placing a small link in your signature in a different forum and then take part in that forum.  Once members see you participating and giving a quality viewpoint then they are more likely to click your link to your forum.

Create a Blog

Create a blog for your forum and make active posts in it.  Creating a blog gives you another gateway into your forum.  So if you have an active blog your forum has more chance of being found therefore that results in you getting more traffic, it could not be more simple.  You are increasing that circle.

Pay Per Click

Using advertising schemes such as Google Adwords. Google Adwords lets you create your own ad which gets displayed on Google’s search engine pages aswell ass other people’s websites. Note: this business can be very costly so I really do suggest researching Google Adwords before trying anything.

Don’t Use Web Traffic Scams

Web traffic scams are websites that say they will send thousands of vistors to your site for say $30. Baloney, if that were the case then no website would ever struggle for traffic. Most of the time it’s a php script that just refreshes it’s self on your website a thousand times. What use is that. We want targeted traffic and buying traffic from such site is not the way to go.

So there we have some do’s and don’ts of increasing traffic. Remember traffic takes time to build up so don’t expect things to happen overnight.  Do you have any more tips? Post a comment and let us know. We love to hear from you!

All the best,
Glen

Running a Successful Forum!