Ideas please

[skb]

Forums on the internet and across subjects are facing a tough time with the rapid advent of social media sites. Even then some focussed forums attract a lot of traffic. Every discussion on the topic on forums for forums has led me to believe that developing "content" is the key to success. That brings us to the cyclic question, how to develop content without participating members.

We have 56 registered members and twice as many who we have thrown out because their intent was spamming. Out of these, 9 members post regularly. I can count 19 more that were regularly posting on the earlier forums but don't visit here.

If we could double the numbers of regular posting members we would be on a roll. Any ideas on what we could/should do, to get some of these 19 to return or induct completely new ones ?

[rocky]

skb, I don't have any knowledge about how forums work to give you any advice. I can tell you, that I feel quite happy visiting here everyday and sharing some news and views with the friends here. I agree, if that were to be doubled, it would be that much more interesting. I could only suggest sending regular emails to the members already enrolled, to probably, remind them but I am not sure if that would be a big help. 

[Skhilled]

I'd start be looking into SEO and how it works. Try adding keywords to the forum that relate to what the site is about to try and increase your ranking in the search engines.

Use the stats in your cPanel to see what parts of the site interest visitors the most.

You can also try to get a sig and avatar to match the look of the logo to use when you visit other forums. People tend to click others sigs just to see what kind of site they have and may end up joining.

There are website directories where you can post your site to try to increase traffic.

Using the free portions of sites like this one will help you learn about SEO and rankings:
https://www.attracta.com/

Google also has many tools and resources to help with this.

[skb]

Thanks skhilled.

I've been doing all of that regularly. I update through attracta and look at Google webmaster tools on a weekly basis. We do need a few more people, who visit and post regularly.

[Skhilled]

You might even want to add a few more topics unrelated to diabetes just to have more to talk about. Could be games, other illnesses, or whatever.