Is 40 unique visitors a day enough for a forum?

December 27th, 2006, 6:21 pm

My site is 6 months old and currently receives 30-40 unique visitors per day. I have wanted a forum for my niche market.

Can you please tell me if it's right for my site? The Arizona link is below in my sig. If not now, when?

December 27th, 2006, 7:28 pm

There's no right or wrong time. Basically, the earlier you start it, the earlier you will build a consistent userbase.

December 28th, 2006, 3:32 am

I would wait untill you get more visitors. It's unlikely that anyone will join the forum if you are getting only 30-40 visits a day. No forum is better than an empty forum.

December 28th, 2006, 5:07 am

Trucker,

A site like yours, which is a family and community friendly site will need to draw more visitors, some forms of promotion that you can afford like print materials (post cards/flyers) and/or googles word sense and the like at Yahoo and MSN could help a lot, make sure to learn the magic of keyword optimization. Next once the visitors are there, make sure there are really interesting subjects for the visitors to talk and read about. From the really deep, to the super fun, for example hot topics/forums for the Black or African American community would be "Should Barack Obama run for president" or "Express your fond farewells to James Brown". Those would get Blacks and non-Blacks to the forums. Do the same in your forums for the Filipino community because that is who your site is geared to, but make it race friendly so Blacks, Whites, and other races will feel welcome and also be interested as well. Once the word gets around, the hits well come. But be proud, you have done well so far, give it time with more promotions and interesting content.

December 28th, 2006, 2:03 pm

TomK and meman, thanks for the idea.

CGFK, your insight is refreshing. Twas a while since I got some caring attention on how to improve my site. I'll keep what you said in a to-do list. Thanks for the compliment too. I really wish my site would be a mutual success for me and my target market. I see that you don't post so often, yet you took time to help out. Thanks, bro.

I wish all of you the best.
Jose

January 14th, 2007, 5:10 pm

Also, even with small amount of visitors, spam bots will very quickly find it and post viagra posts... This means you will have to use signup, verification email etc. However, if you do decide to create a forum already now, you could consider trying to post a few topics (different names) yourself to get discussions going.

January 14th, 2007, 5:55 pm

Thomas, you hit the nail. My contact forms have been hit by viagra spam messages until I included a graphics challenge to filter them out from human senders, thus eliminating them. Guess I have to wait a little while. Thanks bro.

January 15th, 2007, 4:20 am

I bought a hobby site that had around 200 uniques per day and put in a forum, used a paid posting service initially to boost the place and after 6 months it now has 12,000 posts and 1200 members.

A paid posting service can be hit/miss, sometimes it's painfully obvious so look for a good recommendation and agree that unless your 100% happy and then you'll get a refund, you need good spelling and all posts over 10 words.

Even with all the signup verifications I was getting human spammers posting a couple of times per day so live links had ot be removed until users reached 15 posts.

That site now gets around 500-600 unqiues so a good forum on an established domain can also help increase traffic with good posts and topic/thread titles.

January 15th, 2007, 10:27 am

Trucker,

sji2671 is right, I built this really nice family friendly site for my wedding last year. I added a Cpanel php coded guestbook to the site that ran well for friends and family to post congrats. Would you believe spammers hit it, why would they spam a famliy wedding site I can't tell you. All of the wonderful post were lost because the spam code scrambled the free guestbook code to the point the guestbook longer worked. We could not even read the old post. So please make sure your forums are not cheap and basic, try some type of program (ASP) that is directly on your server, and most important your codes cannot be read by no one but you. Also make sure the "Administration Rights" are blocked and locked.

Your Always Welcome Bro!

cgfX

January 16th, 2007, 12:09 am

Hmmm.. this is getting scary lol.

Thanks for your tips. I think I need to do a lot of homework here. Thanks again cgfx and sji2671 for the tips.

Will work on my forum outline, and since this is gonna take a little while, I'd have probably doubled my uniques already and be ready for a forum.