Increasing Community Forum Traffic

Do you own a community forum and struggling to get visitors? Besides optimization, you can try few other tricks that will increase traffic.

You can get input from the existing visitors on the novelty of the forum and what more can be added to the forum to make it more interesting. You should not stop with asking for suggestions; good suggestions should be implemented. This will make the visitors feel special and they will return to your forum often.

Make sure that your forum has an active administrator. Welcome new members with personalized messages and respond to their queries immediately. As an administrator create interesting topics for discussion and also enter into other people’s discussion and offer positive input. Moreover, when you keep posting new content to your forum, it will attract more visitors through search engines. Make it an interactive forum by conducting contests that will bring them some free gifts. Post banners about your forum contest in relevant websites, this will both promote your website and it will also create new back links for your site.

You can send newsletters to your forum members this will also remind them of your forum. Make your newsletters as interesting as possible, leave some information out in your newsletter, and ask the readers to visit your forum to get the complete news.

Most of the forums have ‘refer a friend’ link. Your forum too can have this link and even if one out of every 100 visitors refers one of their friends, it is still an additional signup. If your website has a huge membership then it is easy to get popular. Moreover, this will create more fresh content for your forum on regular basis. This will increase your forum’s visibility in search engine results page.

Keep track of your website traffic, pagerank, search results page position for top keywords. You will be able to device a suitable strategy only based on the performance of your forum in the search engines. This will also help you in identifying the keywords for which you are stronger and keywords that require further work.

Make sure that your online forum is not a dry platform. Make it as interesting as possible. No one will be attracted to a forum that discusses dry topics and has nothing special to offer. Use automated mailing systems to update your forum members of the latest happenings at your forum. You can also think of mailing them when a particular forum posts create great buzz.

Make it a meaningful forum for its users and tie up other free services or free tools along with your forum. Nothing can attract visitors as much as free stuff does. So add some interesting tools to your forum that can be either downloaded or used online.

Besides all the above efforts, make traditional SEO efforts including banner and link exchanges. With constant effort, you can gradually increase visitor traffic to your online forum. Never give up until you start enjoying increased visitor traffic.

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