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Forum Inactivity - Another Forum Killer
There are many things that scare users away from your forum. Perhaps even more than excessive advertising or a poorly design skin, an inactive or empty forum will keep users from participating. Contrary to the popular saying, “if you build it they will come,” an empty forum rarely, if ever, gets posted in. They may come, but they won’t post. Even if your forum has 100,000 posts or more, if it’s inactive, no one will post. Doing so would be like talking to yourself; your post would echo, and no one would hear.
The truth is that unless your forum is active - getting posted in daily, it won’t grow. Even if the admin posts, it’s unlikely a user will post consistently because they’d only be talking to one person.
So, what’s the solution?
Simple. make your forum active.
How? That’s a good question.
Three Ways To Start Your Forum Posting:
- Invite Friends - If you have any real life friends or acquaintances who are interested in the topic of your forum, let them know about it! I never did this myself, but I know that it would have helped my forums in their beginning days significantly. An additional bonus to having your friends post on your forum is that they’re much more likely to stay, simply because they already know at least one person who posts there. This is very beneficial to your forums growth. You want to develop a tight-knit community.
- Talk to Yourself - Create three or four accounts and post on all of them. Make conversation with yourself. This gives off the impression of activity, even if it is fake. This can get tiresome, but it looks better than an empty forum. This is useless if you’re not getting traffic, but if you are getting a steady flow of traffic, your visitors have a much higher chance of actually signing up.
- Post Exchanges - Trade posts with other beginning forums to help initiate conversation, increase activity, and build content. This accomplishes the same thing as you creating multiple accounts, except these accounts are fake. They’re from real people who might stick around after your post exchanges are completed.
The three methods above are only three of many methods of generating posts for your forum. Having an inactive forum is having a useless forum. Even if your forum isn’t active with genuine discussion, you need to, at the very least, give off the impression of activity.
Three Ways Not to Generate Posts:
- Paid Posting - A year or two ago, paid posting was the hype. There were tons of forum posting services promising quality posts for your forum. While there are some legitimate forum posting services out there, most are from 14 year old foreign children who’s first language isn’t English. Most posts are a sentence or two long. Regardless of the quality of posts, paid posting doesn’t do much for your forum. While it does accomplish nearly the same thing as you conversing with yourself, paid posting is temporary; you “talking to yourself” is not.
- Automated Content - Following the paid posting craze was a surge in automated content. I’ll admit, the aspect of having 100,000+ posts automatically was intriguing and I took the bait. It was too good to be true. The software I purchased was buggy and only worked sometimes - a few weeks later it didn’t work at all. On top of this, I was publishing duplicate content. In addition to the technical issues I faced, the idea of having thousands of fake posts also devalues the community. If the forum does get off the ground, it’d be hard to get a community feel from a forum that has a fake majority of posts and users.
- Nothing - The worst possible thing you can do to help your forum grow is nothing. While this may seem obvious to some people, to others it is not. Some people think that if they set it up, a forum will build itself. This is rarely the case. I was fortunate enough to have this happen; I set up the forum and didn’t visit it for months. I returned to it later and was surprised to see it active. This happens less than 1% of the time, so it’s not something you should count on. Keep in mind that typically what you put into it is what you get out of it. If you work hard, you’re likely to get good results. If you slack, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The Importance of Having a Unique Forum Design
The #1 thing that will cause your forum to fail is having a poor design. This is the general consensus, and I’m just reinforcing - it’s true. It has been said that internet users will determine if they’ll stay on or leave your site in less than a second. Because of this, it is increasingly important to have a high-quality and user-friendly design. If you don’t make an impression within the first few seconds you’ve lost that user forever. If your potential members hear fantastic things about your site, it doesn’t matter whatsoever if your site’s look simply, well, sucks. The following are a few basic things that should be considered when thinking about the layout and look of your forum:
General Design
- The actual look, feel, and design of your forum should look clean and professional. Make the look something a large number of users will enjoy instead of the minority. There isn’t anything specific I’d like to pinpoint in regard to this design that isn’t otherwise covered in this post, but overall the general colors and layout of your forum are very important - perhaps the most important. The layout has to be easy to navigate and not straining on the eyes.
Clutter
- Having unnecessary banners and snippets of information might be useful, but it makes your site look bad. This is simply a fact. The cleaner and clearer the site, the more user friendly it will be. Users like designs that are simple. Every additional link, image, and advertisement you have is something that has potential to annoy your user. This is why I discourage the use of large signatures and signatures that have images in them: placing images in signatures litter your forum with unnecessary and distracting images that may upset may potential (and existing) users.
Advertisements
- No one likes ads, but they’re oftentimes necessary to run the site or to make a profit. However, from a user’s point-of-view, the fewer advertisements the better. Moreover, ads should be integrated, yet not intrusive. This is a difficult combination. You want the ads to be effective and get a decent CTR, but you don’t want the users to be significantly distracted or annoyed by them. You want the primary focus of your forum to be on the content posted and on user posting new, additional content. I’ll be making a more detailed post in a few days about the dos and don’ts of advertising on a forum.
But what kind of theme should you get? Should you use a free theme, buy one, make design your own, or purchase an exclusive one? Good themes are rarely free and themes won’t make themselves.
Scratch the Default Theme
While the default themes of most forum software companies are actually good, the fact that every user who uses the software has access to it should be a warning. There are tens of thousands of forums (if not more) on the internet today, and each and every one of those at one point was using a default theme. It’s likely there are still thens of thousands that currently use it today. Using a default theme does nothing to brand your site or make it stand out. It confines you; it makes your forum just another forum. Chances are that more than 50% of users have seen the theme before. This can confuse the users. Moreover, while a default theme is typically well designed, they’re still a long way from fantastic.
Stock and Paid Themes: You’re Getting Warmer
The next step up the totem pole of style is to use a free stock template or buy a better stock skin. While this is certainly better than using the default, it’s still not good enough if you’re serious about being successful. It works for a few, but all the major successful forums are using custom themes or modified default ones. Stock templates make your site look better, but not quite unique. If it’s available elsewhere, chances are it’s used elsewhere. If the theme is used elsewhere, that means users may have seen it elsewhere; if it’s been seen elsewhere, users get confused and annoyed. If you must use a stock template I strongly suggest you customize it to your site; change the colors, give it a custom header, new icons, and other things to make your site different from the original.
Get a Customized Unique Theme
I honestly believe the best thing you can do for your discussion board is to purchase a custom theme. Ideally, if you’re both a good designer and coder, you could do this yourself. However, this isn’t practical for many forum administrators. Usually you can get a high quality, custom theme for under $300. I’ve paid around $200 for mine and am quite satisfied. I don’t recommend you ever pay more than $500 for a theme, unless, of course, you can afford it and think it’s worth it. See my recommended page for some good designers and coders.
Why You Should be Active in Your Community
Each day I’m finding out more and more how important it is to be active in your online community each daily. Recently, my forum had a period in which I only had limited time and limited access to a computer for about three weeks. During this time I was extremely busy and adapted to not doing much work on the forum. As a result, my forum’s daily post rate dropped down from an average of 350 posts/day to about 150 posts/day for most of the month of November.
Once I returned to the site, I made a few minor changes and improvements the users were asking for, and began to participate more on the site. Almost immediately after I returned the post rate increased steadily by nearly 80+ a day more than the previous day. Now we’re sitting around 550 posts/day and still growing. Moreover, instead of having around 80 users login in the past 24 hours, we’re now back to around 105.
If you take a look to the right you can see a chart of the posts from each day. I’ve marked it with when I returned. You can clearly see the posts/day rate. Keep in mind that the 100-200 posts/day were consistent for the whole month of November.
I don’t take sole credit for increasing the posting rate because it really is the members that did it. I just supported them as they posted. I helped spur on conversations. The only real changes I made were rearranging some forums in response to suggestions and improving what subscribers received, which I honestly don’t think had much effect. I think there are several reason for this. One reason that comes to mind is simply the psychology of having a leader - if the board feels there’s someone in charge, it makes the board more strong and official. If an administrator never logs on, the user begins to think that the administrator no longer cares.
While I cannot say with 100% certainty that the forum posts/day increased because I became more active, I feel that this did strongly play a role. If I were to leave the forum for another three weeks, I feel confident that the posts/day count would drop back down to below 200 posts/day instead of the more healthy 550 posts/day. I believe that if I continue to be active in my community each day, the number of posts each day will continue to increase.
To summarize, you should be active in your community daily, because this can significantly increase activity.