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Can new forums still grow these days?

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OC101

Member
Joined
Oct 30, 2007
I recently started a web site and a forum of my own. It is about pets... ALL pets included.

However, it is slow on getting new people... too slow.

Although it's only been up and running for a week, I am getting more bots than real people. Among the real people, all of them were told by me to join one way or another. :bang head We lack of active members to fill the forum with interesting posts.

Just how do you grow a new forum into a huge active community like OCforums these days?

How did OCforums advertise itself during the initial stage? :confused:
With the current rate, I will be getting 10000 bots in 30 years. :screwy:

This is my newbie web site by the way
Pets Keepers Guide
http://petskeepersguide.com/forums

Any tips and help would be appreciated! I would love to hear the stories of how OCforums were started and began to gain members right after the launch.
 
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I recently started a web site and a forum of my own. It is about pets... ALL pets included.

However, it is slow on getting new people... too slow.

Although it's only been up and running for a week, I am getting more bots than real people. Among the real people, all of them were told by me to join one way or another. :bang head We lack of active members to fill the forum with interesting posts.

Just how do you grow a new forum into a huge active community like OCforums these days?

How did OCforums advertise itself during the initial stage? :confused:
With the current rate, I will be getting 10000 bots in 30 years. :screwy:

This is my newbie web site by the way
Pets Keepers Guide
http://petskeepersguide.com

Any tips and help would be appreciated! I would love to hear the stories of how OCforums were started and began to gain members right after the launch.

Tips:

1. Design
- Move your site out of the 90s.
Your front page design needs a major revamp. Here's the thing... There are thousands upon thousands of pet related sites, or any other subject for that matter, so you're going to be competing against all those sites and when visitors reach your site they are faced with a a front page that looks like it hasn't been updated in years.

If you see the front page of overclockers.com you can see what I'm talking about. That page has current articles on rotation at the top, it has nice and flashy graphics, it has a well organized layout. In short; it has all the things that a new visitor wants to see when they first find the site.

If you're not "web site" design inclined... I'd suggest going with one of the free content managers out there. You can check out Wrodpress (wordpress.org). You can use the WP script for free, in fact, your hosting company should have the service of installation of WP and many more scripts that you can use to make a "modern" site. Have a look at wordpress and check out their free "themes"; you can use find a them that fits your subject matter and deploy it within minutes.

2. Content
- Write, write, write... And then write some more. What you need is content for the front page and for all those bots to index. So start writing and posting your writings in your site, make sure to "feature" them on the front page as well.

- Ask your friends to write their about their experiences with their pets and post it at your site. If you deploy the WordPress script, or any other you prefer, you can set up accounts for each of your friends that wants to write and they can login and publish their own articles. Free content. :D

3. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- You will need to familiarize yourself with keyword density, H1 and H2 tags, meta tags, etc. This sounds complicated, and if anyone wants to get serious about it; it really is. But you're not after that; what you want is to make sue that you are at least giving the site the proper title and description tags.
Just use your Google-Fu to find some free reading on the subject; there are plenty of resources out there that you can use to learn the basics. Again; if you go with the WordPress script; it even comes with built in SEO tools that you can use to streamline the basics of the process. :D

4. Patience/Dedication/Perseverance
- Most people think that the internet is a place where the "build it and they will come" concept applies. It doesn't. There are over 1 million websites being deployed daily and yours is just one little drop of water in an ocean of content.
Getting your site to be popular will require you to work hard at it; you will have to make a site that people want to come back to. Most casual web-nauts are out there looking for a "solution to a problem", or "an answer to a question" so make sure that you offer enough of both and your chances of catching people's attention are better.
There is no magic button that one presses and the site is immediately pushed into "web popularity"; you'll have to spend some time building up the content side of things before you start seeing increases in visitors.

I ran a few sites back in the day and I can tell you that going from 10 visitors per day to about 10K unique visitors a day took me about 10 months of hard work and countless nights spent modifying design layouts and adding content. It turned out to be so much work that I decided to pack things up and sold the sites and moved away from the "webmaster" world.

Hope this helps and good luck with the site.
Sebas
 
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Very informative post.
I wish I can have a mentor, or a partner to help me with the technical stuff such as web design. So I can focus on the content and marketing.
 
In addition to what Sebas posted, it's also important to mention that use of forums as an online social outlet has declined a lot. This has been slightly offset by the continuous influx of new web users (as the young become teens/adults, and as older adults finally get internet service). But overall the trend since MySpace and Facebook is that the social networking sites get the casual stuff and sites like ocforums and your site would be mostly useful to people using a search engine for information as Sebas explained. In other words -- without useful information and people still interested hanging around to provide answers when new members arrived, your retention rate is going to be extremely low. This is why the existing sites have such a foothold -- they have the info the search engines require to send people there, and the existing membership to answer new questions. If you're expecting people to 'hang out', then you need to startup a Facebook rival.
 
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So in other word, with Facebook etc. around, it's harder to grow a new forum than in the old days. Am I ten years too late? lol
 
From what I've seen and experienced, it's very hard to get a new forum started nowadays. Basically, everything that needs a forum already has one, and when something new comes out the current forums tend to evolve with it. For example, a forum for a particular game; When the next game comes out, they don't make a new forum, they just start talking about the new game on the old forum.
 
In my opinion, forums are far more superior for discussions than Facebook. You get the people with same interests to join. You get topics listed clearly on each page. On Facebook, most of your friends have their own interests, while pages and groups are terribly designed for serious discussions. Yeah, but Facebook is getting too many people joining.

Does anyone have the chart for ocforums.com gaining members from day one? Like how many people joined on day one, and first month, etc. How long to reach first 500 members, first 1000 members, first 10000 members, etc.
And the methods it used for advertising?
 
Does anyone have the chart for ocforums.com gaining members from day one? Like how many people joined on day one, and first month, etc. How long to reach first 500 members, first 1000 members, first 10000 members, etc.
And the methods it used for advertising?

I'm sure these stats exist, but as far as you getting access to them... I doubt it. You need to realize that OCF is not a site owned by one person, this is a corporate property of iNet Interactive and I'm quite sure that they are not in the business of releasing that type of information to anyone.

To answer a bit of your question. As I mentioned before; I used to run a few websites years ago. My most "successful" site was getting about 100K unique visitors per day when I sold it. That may sound like a lot, but take into account that "rival" sites in my niche (the subject matter of the site) were doing five, six and some even ten times that amount of traffic and that gives you an idea.

Here's how that site progressed, more or less.

- Launch --> No visitors at all other than me, some people I asked to check the site out and the bot crawlers. :D

- One month in --> About 100 unique visitors per day and about 1000 page views a day.

- Three monts in --> About 500 unique visitors per day and about 10000 pageviews a day.
The fact that the page views to unique visitors ratio doubled means that the content started to get better and the people that did come to the site staid for a bit longer than earlier in the site's life.

- Six months in --> 5K unique visitors and about 130K pageviews a day. This is when the site started to get popular and some of the "big" sites in the niche started mentioning it.

- Nine months in --> 10K+ unique visitors and over 200K pageviews. At this point I had to change from my shared hosting plan to a dedicated server. Fortunately; the site was making me enough money at the time that I could afford the more expensive hosting plan.

- One year in --> Over 20K unique visitors.

- Beyond that --> I kept the site running for about 6 years and when I sold it I was getting well over 100K unique visitors per day and almost 3M page views. The money was nice, but I had a full time job and the 40+ hours per week of the "day job" plus the 40+ hours per week that I put into the site became too much for me to bear and I decided to "cash out". :)

The only thing I can tell you is: Looking at how other sites did it won't help you much. Your site is your site and you need to make it work for the audience you want to reach. What worked for OCF is not necessarily going to work for a pet related website.
 
From what I heard, ocforums was running in someone's basement first. By the time it was sold to the company, it already had tens thousands of registered members.

Did you have to write most of your own content? Or you relay on members' free content?

As a forum, I believe most content should be members provided. I could have add a database/article section, but I've seen other popular forums with nothing but a forum with nearly 80k members, while other forum with the same niche with detailed database and articles have only less than half that many members.
 
From what I heard, ocforums was running in someone's basement first. By the time it was sold to the company, it already had tens thousands of registered members.

Did you have to write most of your own content? Or you relay on members' free content?

As a forum, I believe most content should be members provided. I could have add a database/article section, but I've seen other popular forums with nothing but a forum with nearly 80k members, while other forum with the same niche with detailed database and articles have only less than half that many members.

That's how it goes with most large sites. Some "enthusiast" guy starts them and then when they get big enough they get "attention" from corporations.

The sites that I ran were all in the Adult/Dating niche so it wasn't so much about "text" as the mainstream sites. :chair:

I still did it all on my own though. Licensing content, editing images, watermarking videos, making landing pages, making promotional images, promoting the sites and selling advertising. It was a pain because that niche is quite competitive (all niches are though), but I liked it until I got burned out. Nice thing about affiliate marketing (promoting other company's businesses via your website) is that there are "residuals". I still get paid commissions from a few of the dating sites when the customers I sent their way years ago renew their subscriptions. :D
 
In my opinion, forums are far more superior for discussions than Facebook. You get the people with same interests to join. You get topics listed clearly on each page. On Facebook, most of your friends have their own interests, while pages and groups are terribly designed for serious discussions. Yeah, but Facebook is getting too many people joining.

You are absolutely correct (hence why we're here, right?). But how many topics actually require a full forum to be discussed, or questions asked that take pages to answer?

The other benefit of a forum used to be the ability to upload information pertinent to the discussion. But now there's tons of free file and image hosting options, so even that unique function can be found elsewhere. And if it's for social content, nothing connects people better than Facebook at the moment. It's amazing how well I can keep tabs on friends on there.

So other than the existing communities being here for whatever purpose they still serve, there really isn't the same overall NEED as there was say a decade ago for these types of internet spaces to exist.
 
Pet's is a competitive niche on the internet, plenty of people who started doing it a long time ago and are entrenched... And plenty of people making a lot of money doing it. That means a lot of people have an experience and monetary advantage in running a successful pet website.

In order for you to be growing quicker than others, you need to be doing certain things better than them, and your site needs to be more useful than theirs. Even then, it would be an uphill battle even if you are doing everything right.

Just my .02. :)

As for forums, social networking doesn't replace them. Ever google and find an answer from an old facebook discussion, an old reddit discussion, or an old slashdot discussion? Maybe on occassion, but 9 times out of 10 when you search you will see forum discussions in the first page of results. Forums have a hierarchical layout that is critical to being a good reference source of material over time. Social networking is great for right now and getting immediate answers from a group or people you know... but it doesn't retain that information well, which means people don't contribute deep info and build up the reserve of knowledge there the way they do on a forum like this one. Many people realize that their contributions on a forum are going to stand the test of time and could be referenced years from now through search engine searches, and it makes contributing answers and information here worthwhile.
 
As for forums, social networking doesn't replace them. Ever google and find an answer from an old facebook discussion, an old reddit discussion, or an old slashdot discussion? Maybe on occassion, but 9 times out of 10 when you search you will see forum discussions in the first page of results. Forums have a hierarchical layout that is critical to being a good reference source of material over time. Social networking is great for right now and getting immediate answers from a group or people you know... but it doesn't retain that information well, which means people don't contribute deep info and build up the reserve of knowledge there the way they do on a forum like this one. Many people realize that their contributions on a forum are going to stand the test of time and could be referenced years from now through search engine searches, and it makes contributing answers and information here worthwhile.

Generally this is true, but your post only reinforces what you and I and others have said here -- content is key and startup forums are looking at a nearly impossible uphill battle for rankings on the search engines because of this. I don't think things will be as lobsided in a few more years (as they are now), with social networking playing a larger and larger role in all aspects of data warehousing and information retention on the net. With google making a foray into social networking with their google+ service they won't stand for third party forums drawing attention and members away from them. Mark these words -- optimization for social networking content in the search engines coming soon to an internet near you!

In a way this direction makes more sense. In some respects having larger entities retain the data eliminates the loss of data when forums go belly up, but it also puts at risk the quality and objectivity of that data (censoring out complaints/issues depending on conflicts of interests). And there's nothing to stop a business from closing a forum if it's not serving their ends. At least with forums like these we know the forum itself is the reason for it being here, so closing is a much bigger decision. So as with any major change, there's the good and the bad.
 
I recently started a web site and a forum of my own. It is about pets... ALL pets included.

However, it is slow on getting new people... too slow.

Although it's only been up and running for a week, I am getting more bots than real people. Among the real people, all of them were told by me to join one way or another. :bang head We lack of active members to fill the forum with interesting posts.

Just how do you grow a new forum into a huge active community like OCforums these days?

How did OCforums advertise itself during the initial stage? :confused:
With the current rate, I will be getting 10000 bots in 30 years. :screwy:

This is my newbie web site by the way
Pets Keepers Guide
http://petskeepersguide.com

Any tips and help would be appreciated! I would love to hear the stories of how OCforums were started and began to gain members right after the launch.

To be more helpful than my last post, here are some tips about what I think it takes. Just my opinion for whatever its worth.

- Someone uniquely motivated which inspires others to come together. Take KPC forums for instance, it isn't terribly active, but the activity it does have was built from Kingpin going to extraordinary lengths in order to establish street cred as a leader in the field. He then also built a business and launched the forum in support of that... It gets a decent amount of activity for a new startup forum in a heavily saturated market like computer hardware.

- A unique niche in the market. There are tons of computer hardware sites most people don't care about. The people who care about KPC only care because there isn't any other site really like that for extreme cooling, with products as well as extreme gurus hanging out there.

- Investment. In order for people to take your site seriously, you need to invest and for that investment to be demonstrated to your audience. One important way to do this is through solid site design - whether simple or elaborate, it should look professional to inspire the belief in people that your site is worth investing in. People's time is an investment, they will spend it in the way they think is most worthwhile. Your friends are willing to invest in things because they are your friends, to attract strangers they have to perceive value and investment by others.

- Bots will always be a challenge. We average about 60 registrations a day (real people), we average over 500 bot registration attempts a day, we average 3-5 banned spammers a day who get past our safeguards and actually register successfully and get handled by moderators (these are real people, we are blocking 100% of automated bots). You need to install plugins, or develop plugins that work with the stopforumspam API. Custom developed anti-spam solutions are an important measure, anything standard or in wide deployment will be routinely beaten by the bots - they've been learning longer than you have.

Overclockers started as the first overclocking site more or less. I need an old-timer to chime in, but we started in 98, around the same time as hardocp and anandtech, and I don't know who else goes back that far - I know that almost none of our competitors go that far. When you hit a market before it actually exists, you don't have much competition, and chances are people looking to find out about the topic are going to end up on your site. That is how people got to overclockers... Then we got coverage in publications and legitimate media, as others took note of the growth, and we got more people.

Overclockers was designed well for its time, that old grey site looked old ten years later, but when it was first made it was leading edge. It had uniquely motivated people running it - Joe, Ed, and Skip had a passion for the topic, and they quickly built a following of other nuts and bolts guys who came together to talk about the topic. They created a unique niche, and they dominated it. HardOCP went the gamer route and dominated that, we went the enthusiast route and dominated that - other sites began springing out of the woodwork and doing similar things, many of them grew into successful sites as well. Overclockers was one of less than a handful of sites which started a community that reaches across thousands of enthusiast sites currently.

Skip spent a lot of money keeping the servers running and had his own knowledge to build and operate the forum. Joe made a lot of money on banner advertising, as money was just falling out of the sky around when this site launched - you just needed a bucket to catch it all. He hired Ed to write to supplement his own content and that helped support the flow of new content every day, which keeps readers coming back, and keeps advertisers paying. He also had a unique approach in that he actively worked with the community early on and published amateur articles... There weren't many sites like it at the time.

I hope that helps.

More specifically, first my advice is improve your site. You built yours using basekit, which is no good - those sorts of solutions are a scam for people that don't know better. They can serve a certain purpose, but they aren't good. You should use wordpress or a similar CMS for your site. Three reasons:

1. It makes it easier to update content, rather than spending time maintaining the codebase of your site.

2. There are a lot of free themes for wordpress, and a lot of people who would create a theme custom for you for relatively cheap. This will make your site easier to operate, and it will make it more attractive to visitors.

3. SEO is critical to getting visitors and new members. Most CMS come with decent structure for SEO, and offer plugins to improve SEO easily. As you learn more, you can leverage this better which is how you increase the notability and reputation of your site.

Second, my advice is know your competitors. What are leaders in the general pets site niche doing. You need to know what they are doing, and compare it to what you are essentially doing. If you can't compete with them at what they are doing, you need to do something different - focus on where you can win. Be realistic. You have to offer something no one else does, or something better than anyone else does - if you can't do that, your site will fail or blend in with other lame sites. You can be similar, but you have to have something special... Think of local pizza shops. There are probably a half dozen or more within 30 minutes of your house. Those that stay in business do something special.

Third, is have a monetization strategy. You may not be out to make money, but running a successful site costs money. For design stuff, for hosting, for improvements... For instance, if you run a site that makes 50 grand a year, you can quit your job and spend all day every day working on it, and you will make it better if you are smart and working hard. But small scale, even if you just make 1000 a year, thats still the site supporting itself a bit and a little bit of investment you can use to improve the site over time.

Fourth, your site focus is working against you. A general pet site about everything is too generic. It is impossible to compete well in that focus, its like going up against walmart - you aren't going to beat them at their business model. But maybe you could specialize better than they can, if you focus on a certain product or subset of what they do. In your case, that would be a specific breed, or specific animal, or some special twist that differentiates you.

Finally, I'm not criticizing anything you've done. Building and running a site is a learning process, and its hard to do well - plenty of people doing it, few sites stand out from the crowd.
 
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To be more helpful than my last post, here are some tips about what I think it takes. Just my opinion for whatever its worth.

- Someone uniquely motivated which inspires others to come together. Take KPC forums for instance, it isn't terribly active, but the activity it does have was built from Kingpin going to extraordinary lengths in order to establish street cred as a leader in the field. He then also built a business and launched the forum in support of that... It gets a decent amount of activity for a new startup forum in a heavily saturated market like computer hardware.

- A unique niche in the market. There are tons of computer hardware sites most people don't care about. The people who care about KPC only care because there isn't any other site really like that for extreme cooling, with products as well as extreme gurus hanging out there.

- Investment. In order for people to take your site seriously, you need to invest and for that investment to be demonstrated to your audience. One important way to do this is through solid site design - whether simple or elaborate, it should look professional to inspire the belief in people that your site is worth investing in. People's time is an investment, they will spend it in the way they think is most worthwhile. Your friends are willing to invest in things because they are your friends, to attract strangers they have to perceive value and investment by others.

- Bots will always be a challenge. We average about 60 registrations a day (real people), we average over 500 bot registration attempts a day, we average 3-5 banned spammers a day who get past our safeguards and actually register successfully and get handled by moderators (these are real people, we are blocking 100% of automated bots). You need to install plugins, or develop plugins that work with the stopforumspam API. Custom developed anti-spam solutions are an important measure, anything standard or in wide deployment will be routinely beaten by the bots - they've been learning longer than you have.

Overclockers started as the first overclocking site more or less. I need an old-timer to chime in, but we started in 98, around the same time as hardocp and anandtech, and I don't know who else goes back that far - I know that almost none of our competitors go that far. When you hit a market before it actually exists, you don't have much competition, and chances are people looking to find out about the topic are going to end up on your site. That is how people got to overclockers... Then we got coverage in publications and legitimate media, as others took note of the growth, and we got more people.

Overclockers was designed well for its time, that old grey site looked old ten years later, but when it was first made it was leading edge. It had uniquely motivated people running it - Joe, Ed, and Skip had a passion for the topic, and they quickly built a following of other nuts and bolts guys who came together to talk about the topic. They created a unique niche, and they dominated it. HardOCP went the gamer route and dominated that, we went the enthusiast route and dominated that - other sites began springing out of the woodwork and doing similar things, many of them grew into successful sites as well. Overclockers was one of less than a handful of sites which started a community that reaches across thousands of enthusiast sites currently.

Skip spent a lot of money keeping the servers running and had his own knowledge to build and operate the forum. Joe made a lot of money on banner advertising, as money was just falling out of the sky around when this site launched - you just needed a bucket to catch it all. He hired Ed to write to supplement his own content and that helped support the flow of new content every day, which keeps readers coming back, and keeps advertisers paying. He also had a unique approach in that he actively worked with the community early on and published amateur articles... There weren't many sites like it at the time.

I hope that helps.

More specifically, first my advice is improve your site. You built yours using basekit, which is no good - those sorts of solutions are a scam for people that don't know better. They can serve a certain purpose, but they aren't good. You should use wordpress or a similar CMS for your site. Three reasons:

1. It makes it easier to update content, rather than spending time maintaining the codebase of your site.

2. There are a lot of free themes for wordpress, and a lot of people who would create a theme custom for you for relatively cheap. This will make your site easier to operate, and it will make it more attractive to visitors.

3. SEO is critical to getting visitors and new members. Most CMS come with decent structure for SEO, and offer plugins to improve SEO easily. As you learn more, you can leverage this better which is how you increase the notability and reputation of your site.

Second, my advice is know your competitors. What are leaders in the general pets site niche doing. You need to know what they are doing, and compare it to what you are essentially doing. If you can't compete with them at what they are doing, you need to do something different - focus on where you can win. Be realistic. You have to offer something no one else does, or something better than anyone else does - if you can't do that, your site will fail or blend in with other lame sites. You can be similar, but you have to have something special... Think of local pizza shops. There are probably a half dozen or more within 30 minutes of your house. Those that stay in business do something special.

Third, is have a monetization strategy. You may not be out to make money, but running a successful site costs money. For design stuff, for hosting, for improvements... For instance, if you run a site that makes 50 grand a year, you can quit your job and spend all day every day working on it, and you will make it better if you are smart and working hard. But small scale, even if you just make 1000 a year, thats still the site supporting itself a bit and a little bit of investment you can use to improve the site over time.

Fourth, your site focus is working against you. A general pet site about everything is too generic. It is impossible to compete well in that focus, its like going up against walmart - you aren't going to beat them at their business model. But maybe you could specialize better than they can, if you focus on a certain product or subset of what they do. In your case, that would be a specific breed, or specific animal, or some special twist that differentiates you.

Finally, I'm not criticizing anything you've done. Building and running a site is a learning process, and its hard to do well - plenty of people doing it, few sites stand out from the crowd.

I didn't know HardOCP was for gamers. I'm not registered on that site, only on this one, and I'm a gamer. I joined because these forums seemed really friendly and inviting, and had plenty of information and good members who really know their stuff.
 
Hardocp has always been more gamer oriented than us. We are gamer friendly, but historically our crowd has always been more tool shed engineering than hardocp.

At one point hardocp was performing reviews on desktop boxes that dell was paying them to perform. With a casual gamer audience that goes over fine. People around here would hang me on ethics if we did that.
 
Hardocp has always been more gamer oriented than us. We are gamer friendly, but historically our crowd has always been more tool shed engineering than hardocp.

At one point hardocp was performing reviews on desktop boxes that dell was paying them to perform. With a casual gamer audience that goes over fine. People around here would hang me on ethics if we did that.

:rofl: I think I like it here just fine. :)
 
:rofl: I think I like it here just fine. :)

Good. Retail boxes are fine for people who don't know what the difference between socket AM3+ and socket 2011, can't tell the difference between a $10 power supply from $100 power supply, or are just plain noob with screwdriver. But for us, we build PC because we usually get better result, more customizable options, easier to overclock, etc.

I haven't bought a retail box in over a decade, not since some of the big name quietly slipped in nonstandard ATX power pinout to discourage user from self upgrading or customizing.
 
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