Driving traffic to a forum

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paulocon

New Member
Hi,

Anyone have any general tips for driving traffic to a forum?

I have setup a Self-Build forum at Self Build In Ireland Forum - Index.

I think it's a topic with a good target audience but finding it hard to gain any momentum....

Just wondering if anyone has any general tips for building/keeping visitors to a forum...
 
mneylon

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
Work on the SEO.

The session IDs etc., in the URLs won't help
 
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paulocon

New Member
One more, thanks Blacknight..

I think SMF has a way of building URL's without session ID's so I'll do some reading up on that.
 
mneylon

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
I'd check out their module / extensions. There are a couple of SEO ones that may help
 
Cormac

Cormac

New Member
Paul, if you google SimpleMachines SEO you will get some solid tips, but SEO can only take you so far. You need to work on SEM (marketing).

Links in sigs is the best way of getting word about, ask your top forum members to place a link in their sigs on the various boards they use. Make sure anchor text is used as to give detail about the forum is about. 'Irish PC builders' or something similar should get click thru from those who are interested.

I think sitemaps are the best source for SEO on forums, you can submit your rss feed to yahoo's siteexplorer as it is and you can get a sitemap mod for simplemachines fairly easily.

I'm not sure if boardtracker is available for simplemachines but if it is then you should jump on that ship. Ask on the simplemachines forum if there is a way to sydicate your forum threads/rss at all.

The simplemachines forum is really the best place to ask as they will have tried and tested all the techniques available in some shape or form.
 
Cormac

Cormac

New Member
Syndicated content is always a good thing. Increased backlinks and all that lark... You asked before about getting the most of vBulletin's RSS feed and I was meant to reply with information on boardtracker but the reply button eluded me that evening and it lapsed out of my memory.

It's the closest thing to Technorati exclusively for message boards so why not. It's only going to grow too.

I setup an account before but I never actually completed the whole setup as I had things on. I wish I did. :(
 
Cormac

Cormac

New Member
Another thing you should focus on is improving your community relationships. There are a few plugins which can help you with this such as the Auto PM and the automatiac thread on user registration which welcomes them to the board.

But both of those do pretty much the same exact thing tbh.

I was to run another forum I would install the automatic PM plugin, and within provide information on what the forum is about, who to contact if assitance is needed, give details about what type of thread is suited in each forum and finally provide a link to the 5 most usefull threads.


(not sure if those plugins are available on simplemachines buy they're available on VB anyway)
 
Redfly

Redfly

New Member
Hire a poster if you have to to give the forum some beef. Then get your mates to post a few. Make sure you have email notification of EVERY post set up.

Use two different admin accounts and reply twice to any forum topic from a "Real" user.

Once you have something, depending on your niche, run a small borad match adwords campaign and make sure your landing page has a VERY strong incentive to sign up and powerful call to action to compliment that.

Also, a little tip for you, if your users are not so tech savvy, I would go with Vanilla.
 
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