What's the best way to get traffic to an Internet forum?

[Billy's Little Trip]

I figured people here might know this kind of stuff. Like, how to get at the top of web searches, buzz words that bring in looky loos, content, etc.
Thoughts?

[JonPorobil]

Step 1. Design your content for humans, not machines. Then make the content good enough for people to want to come back and refer friends.

If that doesn't work, tell every living person you know about the project, while continuing step 1.

If that doesn't work, get into an ad exchange program, while continuing step 1.

If that doesn't work, rethink your business model, focusing on step 1.

[ujnhunter]

Porn.

[Hoblit]

Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) techniques

Do a google search on SEO or Search Engine Optimization and you'll spend the next 6 hours reading a bunch of boring yet extremely useful information on the subject.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) techniques

Do a google search on SEO or Search Engine Optimization and you'll spend the next 6 hours reading a bunch of boring yet extremely useful information on the subject.

This is the kind of thing I was looking for. Damn, there is a lot to read, isn't there? Can you read it for me and get back to me?

@ Jon. I think I have things people want to talk about. But it still needs an edge, like something interactive like SF. This isn't my band site, by the way. I'd never whore my music.

@ Unj. I added porn and marijuana last week. I asked the question at my Mustang site, which is a family site that doesn't allow even cuss words, and the first two things that were said were porn and pot, lol. Infact, out of 30 some replies about content, 23 mentioned some form of porn or scantily dressed woman. Of course it's a car site, so it's mostly men. But two women also mentioned porn and one wants a male porn and a local dating section. I told her I'd set it up if she runs it. She agreed, so I guess I'll have a penis section coming soon, lol.

[roymond]

I was going to say create an account for BLT, but then...

[JonPorobil]

Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) techniques

Do a google search on SEO or Search Engine Optimization and you'll spend the next 6 hours reading a bunch of boring yet extremely useful information on the subject.

BLT, the trouble with this is that it's a tricky balance between optimizing your site for Google to be able to find you, and making sure your content is still organic and helpful to the people who find it. I've seen some websites that are virtually unusable because the designers spent so much effort getting Google to notice them that they forgot that, you know, people were the ones doing the clicking.

So if you're gonna go down Hoblit's road, just remember that.

I kinda figured you weren't talking about your music website. What is this venture?

[Billy's Little Trip]

I kinda figured you weren't talking about your music website. What is this venture?

Well, it's more of a personal test, for the most part. I've been somewhat successful in the meat world with starting and selling businesses and just doing business in general.
My vision is nothing new. It's to use a shopping mall as my business design. There will be a multitude of forums in one big site. Many different things for many different tastes. Each forum will be operated by others and I'll be the Admin until I turn that job over to someone else.
The goal: To build traffic to sell ad space and merchandise.
The minimum goal for 2009: To make $1.00 profit by this time next year.
The ultimate goal for 2009: To build a profitable turn key site and sell it.

[Hoblit]

Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) techniques

Do a google search on SEO or Search Engine Optimization and you'll spend the next 6 hours reading a bunch of boring yet extremely useful information on the subject.

BLT, the trouble with this is that it's a tricky balance between optimizing your site for Google to be able to find you, and making sure your content is still organic and helpful to the people who find it. I've seen some websites that are virtually unusable because the designers spent so much effort getting Google to notice them that they forgot that, you know, people were the ones doing the clicking.

So if you're gonna go down Hoblit's road, just remember that.

I kinda figured you weren't talking about your music website. What is this venture?

For the record, you don't HAVE to paint your website with such a broad brush. SEO is exactly good for the people clicking as long as you paint your website with the right sized brush. In fact that is part of the idea in the first place. However, you're absolutely right that generally this can be abused and generalize everything.

The trick is to find that balance you're speaking of. If you are a tire store that's one thing, but if you're selling treads, that's another. You need to make sure that the people looking for treads find you, not everyone looking for tires. Too many people add keywords that don't pertain to their service just to hook ANYONE into seeing their name more often in Google searches. (by also dropping that one word in text somewhere on the page)

SEO is definitely a competition that has gotten out of hand in OUR opinion. However, it can still be used correctly and be of use to BLT...and you're advice is correct, he'll have to be careful and specific.

BLT: I have read much on the subject and if I wrote it down for you...it'd end up just like all that boring information you Googled already. You have to sift through it yourself! (OR PAY ME $$$$$!!! )

[JonPorobil]

Hoblit's point of view is definitely valid, and it's clearly closer to what BLT was looking to hear than my advice, but:

If I were trying to run a website with profit as my main goal, I imagine there'd be a lot more money in providing premium product than there is in however many extra Google clicks that even judiciously-applied SEO gets you. If your service is noteworthy, people will link you, and that will make you climb up the Google results ladder.

In the end, it's a cost-benefit relationship. How much time are you devoting to researching and applying SEO, and could that time be better spent focusing on the site and product?

Your mileage will always vary, of course, especially depending on what kind of business you're trying to run. So what kind of business is it? (EDIT: I see you answered before I asked. Oops.)

Hehe, I just pictures Hobs and myself as an angel and devil on BLT's shoulders. That kind of cracks me up.

[Caravan Ray]

@ Jon. I think I have things people want to talk about....

Oh? So you've stopped talking about cars?

Of course it's a car site

...nevermind

[Hoblit]

Hoblit's point of view is definitely valid, and it's clearly closer to what BLT was looking to hear than my advice, but:

1. If your service is noteworthy, people will link you, and that will make you climb up the Google results ladder.

2. In the end, it's a cost-benefit relationship. How much time are you devoting to researching and applying SEO, and could that time be better spent focusing on the site and product?

3. Hehe, I just pictures Hobs and myself as an angel and devil on BLT's shoulders. That kind of cracks me up.

1. Ha, exactly...in fact one of the biggest (and first) things SEO tutors do is explain how important it is to get links TO your site. (Mutual links do almost nothing these days, link exchanges have all but died. It was a neat trick while it lasted)

2. Absolutely correct with no room for argument. Just like in any form of advertising budget. Except the budget scenario here illustrates the important old saying "time is money".

3. Cute analogy! Although I have to say were are much closer to the ears though. I believe we are both correct and just offering two (similar but) different angles.

[Billy's Little Trip]

@ Jon. I think I have things people want to talk about....

Oh? So you've stopped talking about cars?

Of course it's a car site

...nevermind

The second quote is where I took the poll, not my new site.

@Jon and Hobz. If you two were on my shoulders, we'd look like this.

[Billy's Little Trip]

The minimum goal for 2009: To make $1.00 profit by this time next year.

Well, it looks like I hit my minimum goal for 2009. I'll let you know when the money clears. I wasn't even trying to sell an ad yet. I've been copying and pasting all of the free Google ads that are on the new site that pertain to content I have, because I'm going to be getting rid of those. One of them is a law firm that specializes in Marijuana law. I have a mj news, announcement and info forum, so I emailed them to let them know that I have a new start up web forum with an mj section and I'm adding them to my info section. They must have misunderstood me, because they replied asking if they can get an exclusive as they mj law firm for southern California and they sent their little banner link along and asked what the quarterly rate is. So I figured, what the hell. I told them that at this time, our traffic is very minimal and we have only 72 registered members, but that number will increase considerably over the next 6 months, so at this time the ad rates are $28 a month and they are due quarterly. He told me that his best ad dollars are spent on smaller sites because they are much less expensive. It's funny because I don't even know what to charge yet and I said the quarterly due date because that's how the Mustang site I admin does it. So they reply and tell me that if I can sticky their banner with a link and a brief description of their services in my mj information section, they will pay one year in advance. Then they asked me to fax them the ad agreement and asked for my pay pal account to send the funds. I don't even have pay pal yet, so I told him that he can mail me a check to my business address.

Ad space sales to date:
Businesses solicited = 1
Ads sold = 1

I'm liking these numuz.

[Märk]

Some some random guys are going to send you $112 on the merit of a couple email exchanges. You'd think lawyers would be the most untrusting people around, but hey... they're lawyers, I'm sure they'd know how to make you suffer if you stiffed them on your end of the deal

Remind me to get into selling ad space on internet forums.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Funny you should say that, Mark. I got back to my office to find my banner ad agreement with legal like changes to my original agreement, faxed back to me. First off, I dislike lawyers. I like the guy who handles my business issues, but I like him as a business associate, if you know what I mean. It's all pretty straight forward, he just made changes to the fact that I will sticky his banner at the top of the mj info section, etc. But yes, he was very much line for line to the agreement we made. One of the lines were, "if I give up on the site before the end of our 1 year agreement, I am liable for paying back the remaining advance paid months not supplied". So I'm pretty much locked into keeping that site alive for one year. I've already emailed him a link to his stickied banner, and he said it looks fine.

[Märk]

You do realise, though, that making money off internet ads makes Baby Jebus strangle kittens.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Well that's just great! Evey time I try to get ahead, a kitten dies! I'll have no part of this!
Mark, think of the weirdest section you can think of and I'll make it, make you the mod, and I'll try to get you funding. I'm serious!
Someone up there decided long ago that they will keep me humble. I can't make myself rich, only comfortable. It's like a curse. But that doesn't stop me from helping others. I SHALL HELP OTHERS!

Take that you .....you, who ever you are people! If you are even people! You Bastards!

aaaaand scene.

[Project-D]

Websites are somewhat different than forums in the way content is produced, you as the admin don't have as much control over the content. Still I've been doing a lot of SEO stuff lately and Hoblit is right about the SEO stuff. Generic is right about producing quality content too. But there's a crapload of boring SEO stuff out there that's useful - if you can weed out the crap. Here's a shortlist of some things I found useful.

Most every good SEO site will tell you, "write for humans not search engines" There's no reason you can't write for people and make it SE friendly. For example, if you use images name them something like gibson_tuneomatic_bridge.jpeg instead of 134473.jpeg, that way when people google for images of gibson, tune-o-matic, or bridge, your picture will come up. Use the "alt" tag with images too. It lets people with vision problems know what they're looking at, and screen readers for the blind will read it for them. You never think of using images as part of your search strategy but it can help, it's helpful to humans, and it's good web practice.

This next thing has helped a lot for me, it translated searches into clicks. It helps humans but doesn't effect SEO. If you title a post "How to Write a Song" it will show up in a search engine when people search "write song" "how to write song" etc. But, you'll get more clicks if you put something like "Four Easy Steps to Writing a Song." People seem to like lists, I've seen it work with my own site when I changed titles to "listy" titles. Then I had to "chunk" the content to be a list but it was fairly easy - and it made the content more readable for humans.

Sign up for Google Analytics, it's free and it will track any trend, visitor, search term, page click, etc. You could imagine. You can set goals to try different things on your page and measure the success of each one. It's good to see hard data on what is working.

Here's another thing you could do, join some social sites, and then join groups that are related to your content. Participate and be useful. Find blogs related to some of your content. Comment appropriately. Being seen by lots of people as a guy with something to offer can, in time, bring people to your site.

Awesome content won't always translate to SEO. Here's an example: How many of you have heard ofhttp://mimf.com? It's a forum of musical instrument makers, they can help you make a guitar from scratch, fix warped necks, split headstocks, wrap pickups, wire electronics, the list goes on an on. I don't think there's a site with more, or more useful content out there. Yet Google "make a guitar" and it won't come up on the first three pages. Google "make an acoustic guitar" and it will. It's the word "acoustic" that gets them the great position, it should be the word "guitar". That's something a little SEO could fix.

I know you're looking at a forum as opposed to a blog, but here's a site that has a lot of good tips. My wife met this guy at a local networking event she hosted, and he makes a lot of money on the web. http://www.davidrisley.com/ He's got some good solid tips without useless teasers and mumbo-jumbo. This, in particular, is an answer to your question.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Cool, thanks for all the good info, PD. I bookmarked David Risely's site for further reading.

[JonPorobil]

Here's another thing you could do, join some social sites, and then join groups that are related to your content. Participate and be useful. Find blogs related to some of your content. Comment appropriately. Being seen by lots of people as a guy with something to offer can, in time, bring people to your site.

This. Exactly this.

My wife has a blog, and by doing exactly as recommended above, she's seen her weekly readership grow to several hundred unique pagehits a day. She's not interested in ad revenue or traffic, but that kind of activity makes it a viable option.