Help Needed - High Traffic Website, Forums Inactive

[Amaresh]

Hello,
I run a football (soccer to the americans amongst us) website cum forum at http://thesoccerforum.net

Over the last few days, our website has managed to have around 1500 uniques daily, with the highest going close to 4000 a couple of days back.

But, I have had only like 3-4 new signups on the forum over that period, and only one of them has started posting.

Could any one please guide me so that I could have a better conversion of the unique visitors to forum members, even if 5 new members sign up daily, it wouldn't be long before we'll have a bustling community.

Thanks in advance.

[Scott]

First IPB board I've seen on here ;)

I know you didn't post this under reviews, but I'd just like to suggest rearranging your forums. You have quite a lot of forums, most with not many posts. I would suggest merging a few of them together (eg The Third Half forums).

You might want to install the welcome PM mod here (http://mods.invisionize.com/db/index.php/f/5370) which will allow you to send a PM to all new members, showing them where the introductions forum is, for example.

Good luck :)

[Jan]

Moved to reviews :)
Seems you may have edited since Scott's post :)

[SoftWareRevue]

. . . Could any one please guide me so that I could have a better conversion of the unique visitors to forum members, even if 5 new members sign up daily, it wouldn't be long before we'll have a bustling community. . .I think you need better navigation.

When I go to http://thesoccerforum.net/, view an article, go to read more, I'm at the blog. Sure you have a link to 'discuss on our forum.' But, I'd just change the 'read more' to direct to a thread on the forum. Of course, that would mean you'd have to have forum posts as articles.

The navigation in your header looks like part of the header. It doesn't resemble navigation much.

If you want to get members for your forum, you have to get them to your forums.

I would seriously consider your need for the blog. With your forum, you can have a home page (like we have here (http://www.forumuniversity.com/)) that shows articles that you've posted and whatever else you want to showcase.

Why do you prefer the blog?

[Amaresh]

Hi, thanks for your feedback.

Even though its a tempting option to go for the portal instead of doing a site, i preferred to use WordPress as i felt it would help keep the articles organized in a better way than a portal would have done.

Another thing it has done is boosted our rankings in google and msn and people are finding us on a more regular basis, than they did before when we had a forum on our main page.

But this sudden influx of visitors( we averaged not more than 30 unique before this week, and we've shot up to 1500 on an average daily), has left me thinking that what you're suggesting might actually be the only feasible solution, even though I'm still hoping that we could be like the many sites out there that have a popular forum even though the website is not that well integrated within the forum.

[SoftWareRevue]

If you want to try and keep your blog software, at least try to make it easy to find your forum.

When I first looked at the site, I had no idea there was a forum involved.

Try to make it more prominent in navigation. Mabye see if you can get the navigation out of your header. It just blends in too much for me.