hey guys,
I am staff of the-chess-forum.com and have a problem. Oliver and I are really the only active members lately.
We have an excellent design to the forum with loads of features, yet hardly anyone has joined lately except for spam bots
Here is what we have:
1. Play chess right from our website;
2. Discuss chess in numerous categories *BUT NOT TOO MANY*
3. We have an excellent design;
4. Nice portal page;
5. Well-built design; and
6. A chess PGN viewer to embed chess boards on our forum.
I don't quit understand what's going on with the forum. We have only 1 stationary ad and it is 100% free. I just did some re-arranging the other day from the review I recieved.
Maybe host tournaments with prizes or something.
SEO, advertising, keyword targeting, affiliation, create/purchase a custom skin, keep active, create competitions, there's many things you can do.
@Alex,
I will talk to Oliver about that. I need to get some more members first.
@Malcolm,
We have a facebook page, twitter page, and have the SEO plugin. We have a custom skin--which is very nice and a lot of other things.
(2011-08-16, 05:48 PM)kohai Wrote: [ -> ]We have a custom skin--which is very nice
That's not a custom theme. Many forums use the same theme. I meant custom as in completely unique.
@Malcholm,
We did do some updates to the theme like our custom icons for the posts. I have not a clue on CSS so unless someone wants to give suggestions...
(2011-08-16, 06:14 PM)kohai Wrote: [ -> ]@Malcholm,
We did do some updates to the theme like our custom icons for the posts. I have not a clue on CSS so unless someone wants to give suggestions...
You can always commission someone to make an exclusive theme for your site.
Having a Facebook page or Twitter account that isn't active doesn't do anything for you.
Having an SEO plugin doesn't automatically mean your website will succeed in search engine optimization.
Your forums theme is not custom.
Your domain is also unfavorable (with all the dashes...)
(2011-08-16, 05:48 PM)kohai Wrote: [ -> ]@Alex,
I will talk to Oliver about that. I need to get some more members first.
@Malcolm,
We have a facebook page, twitter page, and have the SEO plugin. We have a custom skin--which is very nice and a lot of other things.
To the best of my knowledge, content is key... you need very regular updates to your sites content. Its this that gets the site crawled by the google bots and the like more often. I'd also recommend including a shoutbox on your forum front page... it gives people immediate interactivity on your site and might compel them to join up.
Social Networking sites are a good way to attract attention, but not if you just post a link and sit on your hands waiting for members to come to your forum. The best approach for using social networking sites is to create a page for your forum, then post that to everyone in your list, and explicitly ask people to click like on it and get them to pass the message onto their friends in their accounts. Even if they aren't interested themselves, the more people that click like, the more widely your website page gets distributed, and consequently the more likely you are to reach your target audience. It only takes about 10 minutes to create a facebook 'page' about your site. Twitter can also be very useful if you have an account with many followers.
Good luck, and most definately, don't give up... forums are notoriously difficult to take hold in the early days... with time, the rate of new members joining will increase.
Should add Prizes, points, Tickets......