Creating and running a discussion forum

[Lorna]

We have a similar problem with our forum - we have just launched Buy, Sell and Search for UK Property FREE with Tick Every Box - Welcome which is a forum solely dedicated to property, homebuying etc. but getting traffic and people to sign up is a real problem. Unless you are extremely busy, people seem to be put off posting. Any suggestions most gratefully received.

 

[temi]

Hello Lorna, welcome to UK WW, similar problem to what did you have at your forum? 9Have I missed something?
BTW, do not forget to introduce yourself at the intro thread: http://forums.ukwebmasterworld.com/new-members-introduction/

 

[Lorna]

Hello Lorna, welcome to UK WW, similar problem to what did you have at your forum? 9Have I missed something?
BTW, do not forget to introduce yourself at the intro thread: http://forums.ukwebmasterworld.com/new-members-introduction/

Sorry - I read the first post in the thread and forgot to 'quote'. A similar problem to the first poster, where they had a new forum but not much traffick. Sorry for the confusion!

 

[temi]

Ahh, now I understand. One of the ways to remedy that is by post exchange. We run a small post exchange here if you want to join let me know.
Basically, you go to other people's forum, add for example 10 post, they come to you forum and add ten posts to help each other get your forum off the ground

 

[Lorna]

yes that would be good. what do I do?

 

[temi]

Its almost like matching property buy with a seller About how many post can you confortably commit to posting a month? It does not have to be a large amount, 20? that is about 5 post per week.
I will then find another person who will post the same number of post in your forum per month.
Is 20 post okay?

 

[Lorna]

Yes that would be great. Let me know more info when you have it. Thanks

 

[temi]

Would be in touch with you by Monday.
Thanks

 

[gibby]

Im no expert but I have found a great web hosting co that have support in the UK but have all the hosting in the US
pcs-net.co.uk
have been great with me as I knew very little about forums and they even restored everything for free when it got hacked

they are very cheap and the email support is 24 hrs
usually I get a reply back in a few mins when I have questions.

I dont pay much at all for the hosting and the £9.99 package got me started and I think I pay £25 a year now as we ahve alot of stuff on our webspace

let me know what you think

Gibby

 

[RiverWire]

Sorry if this has been mentioned earlier in the thread im a bit short for time at the min (Spurs v chelsea)..

My forum has been up for around 3 - 4 months now and nearly hitting 120 members , i havent really focused on getting the members ive just focused on SEO , my main stream of members now is starting to be google but in the early days (and i still do this) is heavy social networking , Digg , Del.icio.us , furl.

basicly my site is a football site where i can Digg e.g Match reports,lastest news articles and so on , if you have 3 or 4 friends to digg your story every couple of days for a week it works well.

My main example for this would be my Live Match links that i publish, i digg a story with the links 3 or 4 days before the match is live , by the time the match comes on the third day that tread is in the top 10 of google (most of the time) and i get massive traffic from that (when i say massive, i mean more than usual)

So i suppose what im saying in a one liner is , digg away remember bot's love digg etc and they will crawl you more often even if you thread is only on top for them 3 - 4 days at least your getting traffic in that time.

Maybe a better example is this.

On saturday Paul Robinson (tottenham Goal keeper) scored from 95 yards out !!!!

I got the video within a hour of this happening and dugg away.

Heres the simple site i made for the vid :

Tottenham Hotspur Paul Robinson Goal

Heres the link for the stats (for that page only)

eXTReMe Tracking

as you can see that i posted the link on one or to forums too , but the google traffic has come from me digging the story etc...

Hip this kinda makes sense ive lost what i was saying

 

[temi]

But do you get a UK IP address or a US IP address?

Im no expert but I have found a great web hosting co that have support in the UK but have all the hosting in the US
pcs-net.co.uk
have been great with me as I knew very little about forums and they even restored everything for free when it got hacked

they are very cheap and the email support is 24 hrs
usually I get a reply back in a few mins when I have questions.

I dont pay much at all for the hosting and the £9.99 package got me started and I think I pay £25 a year now as we ahve alot of stuff on our webspace

let me know what you think

Gibby

 

[gibby]

thats a great question, they used to have severs in the UK but moved everything to the us as its far cheaper and the bandwith quota was better

does it make any difference?

I will ask

Gibby

 

[temi]

Well to some extend it does to your ranking. There is this think called Geo IP that most serch engines us. So if your site is hosted on a US IP address they assume its a US site and it will not rank well for UK keywords, if its hosted on a UK IP address its assumed to be a UK website and it will rank well for UK related keywords.

 

[gibby]

got this reply

Our hosting platform is currently located across 3 datacentres in the US. Our choice for this is because these are some of the biggest datacentre platforms in the world and offer connections and redundancy far greater than any UK datacentre can provide. Also, with UK to US connections being so large nowdays, this makes very little difference to performance at all. Our management are also currently investigating the feasability of extending this platform to our own data suites in the UK as well if a UK location is specifically required.

-----------------
we are aiming for our biz to be more european than UK and also getting alot of interest from the US
so I suppose we cant win eaither way
but pcs have been fantastic with help - far more than I ever expected

Gibby

 

[temi]

Professional SEO will tell you that you need to be in the UK if your primary targed it the UK or European market.

 

[Ping]

I am running an "informative" forum, but traffic is still real S-L-O-W!

Hope to get nice suggestions and inputs from here.


:helpsign:

 

[Meti]

I am running an "informative" forum, but traffic is still real S-L-O-W!

Hope to get nice suggestions and inputs from here.


:helpsign:

Problem is maybe you're being too informative, and that maybe doesn't encourage a user to respond to any discussions?

That is why you should open threads, with a few questions pointing to the public, this makes other users involved in the discussions, as they try and help out.

If you simply have threads with lots of information, and no real questions there, why should they bother to reply?

Common mistake many forum owners do in the early stages, I think the best way is to find a balance, between informative and threads dedicated to questions etc.

- Meti

 

[Ping]

I hope my site is that informative yet, but getting there.

Well, it is supposed to let forum posters to post their personal favorite idiomatic expressions, so that the it can help build up the library of idioms.

 

[prakharmaheshwari05]

thanx for the advices..

 

[bacardi]

I am having the same problems as my site is a couple of months old and still I have under 40 members, the good thing is that proboards hosts the site for free so this site is costing me nothing so far