Help me switch from an online resource to a community

[Goober]

Well,

I have created a forum, www.HomeRepairHow2.com, Its been online for probably three months now. Its far from a community, in fact at the moment, it just seems to be a resource. I have been building it with the philosophy that if you build it, they will come.

Well, in a sense, they have. I have made everything I can Search Engine Friendly, Links are all static, keywords everywhere, submitted in all major search engines and Im getting allot of referrals from them. However MSN seems to be throwing the most at me, Yahoo second and Google is actually 5th. Im not too worried about Google at the moment, seems that by reading other boards, Google has not been performing right. So I await the day Google figures itself out and dumps some visitors my way.

Its already the 13th of the month and I have surpassed my unique visitor count of last month, so its growing, mostly due to search engine referrals.

The problem is, I have no active members.

I have three accounts myself on the board, two of which are fake members that I use to post question and then I answer them the best I can.


Any other suggestions on how I can start to build a community opposed to just the website I have now?

[sandrodz]

thats because guests who come there read all the info and don't have incentive to register, besides the fact that you have forum doesn't stand out right now... I barely found "community" link there :)

Try to move all articles under forum and make it available only for members, that way guests will have incentive to register and read, that can give you good visit/sign-up conversion.

Good luck!

[Goober]

Hmmm,

Thanks for the sugestion. I will see what I can do to make it stand out as more of a community.

On the other hand, if I left articles only available to members, then search engins wouldnt index them. Seeing as I get most of my trafic from searches, not having articles indexed would be a huge deal.

[sandrodz]

not quite correct, you can get modification of vb and google and all other spiders will crowl your pages as members :)

[SoftWareRevue]

Okay. I'm back. :blush:

I had looked when you first posted this thread. Then the internet sucked me into the vortex and I forgot to get back here and give you my suggestion that surprises even me.

erm . . I ain't surprised I didn't make it back here. I'm just surprised at what I'm about to suggest.

More forum categories. It seems we always suggest new forums to keep the number of categories down. But I think you've taken that to the extreme.

Although having your one category forum makes it easy to search for something, it's only easy because you need to only highlight that category on the search page. But someone can search the entire forum anywho.

I just saw it as messy and not conducive to browsing. When I get to a new forum, I want to look around the different categories and see what lies within. I have a problem when the thread titles jump from ironing a shirt, fixing a roof, planting bulbs, and changing a compressor. (Not saying, those are the topics I noticed) But, I'd like to see the categories a little more defined.

[HostFrog]

What about providing only certain sections of the forum only available to registered users? Not really sure if that is the answer your looking for it may help you get some people to register. As it was said before you have no incentives for people to join, so therefore they wont. Make them...pretty simple if you can accomplish that.