Thread: Advise please on what to do with my websites

Hey All,

A while ago I decided to have a go at starting a few websites. I have a huge interest in electronic and Dj'ing and wanted to have a go at starting a site and seeing how successful I could make it.

Basically, technology has taken over the Dj revolution and the days of spinning Vinyl have now been surpassed by electronic equivalents like Mp3 Compatible CD Decks and more recently external controllers with music software on laptops. From the very beginning I've been into this, but always thought that there was little on the web dedicated to it. So I decided to do it myself.

I'm a big believer in message boards, so I started www.digitaldjforum.com - a message board dedicated purely to Digital DJ's. Soon after I made a complimentary website for this, I always wanted a chance to play about with a CMS so used Joomla to build www.digital.dj. More recently I realised that there was no actual websites specifically for DJ's in Ireland, so i then started www.irishdjforum.com

Initially they went very well, traffic was great and user base was growing. However after not so long it hit a plateau and has never really gone any further. I did everything I could with SEO on the main site and both the forums. When I changed my main site to a (what I thought was a fantastic new domain name) www.digital.dj - traffic suffered as Google doesn't like weird tld's much.

I always made an effort to make my members as welcome as possible, help help them and encourage them to post more. But it stagnated, and then died off. Initially I tried posting on other sites with my websites in my sig, but I don't have the time to keep this up.

So. I'd like some advice from the experts please. I want to try to kickstart these as much as possible. Any suggestions?

I was thinking I should have a go at a Google AdWords campaign? I don't make any money off these sites - that was never the intention - however I have been able to wangle a freebie or two, so perhaps spending some cash will improve the website and get me more perks too!

Thanks for reading, any advice greatly appreciated.
Cheers
Zascar

P.S. Stats if you are interested: digitaldjforum - digital.dj - irishdjforum

Did you 301 your previously indexed content to the new domain?
You're using Session IDs in your forum too. Not really a good thing.

To acquire more users, have you thought about holding a contest at all? You could try and get some free equipment from sponsors in exchange for advertising / exposure and do some advertising on related sites.

Where does your audience hang out?

Which sites would they frequent?

Which radio stations do they listen to?