Suggestions to increase membership to forum

[DarrenC]

Hi everyone.

I run a forum (http://www.travel-rants.com/forum) which can be quite enjoyable helping people looking for holiday ideas, holiday planning etc but in 18 months I only have 200 members.

Any sugggestions in how I can increase the membership to the forum?

Do you run a forum and have had success with it?

Can you see something that might stop people joining up?

Any advice appreciated.

Darren

[cqueen]

Looks good!

Is it just about complaints though? I didnt look in detail but that was my first thought, but I do like the look of the forum.

[DarrenC]

Thanks cqueen.

No the forum is basically open to discussions about anything related to travel. It's sort of split up into continents, and other sections, like travel planning.

There's a good bunch of people who regularly chat on there, but I'd like to see it a lot busier than it is, and I really need some ideas to get it buzzing!

[davenny]

I think you really need to get the forum at least #1 or #2 under a category in the search engine. That is how I found this forum several weeks ago. I am not an SEO or anything but forums normally rank high as long as the crawlers are coming back everyday.

Erik
http://www.usspin.com
SPiN - Super Powerful Networking has decided to Open Source its system; it is complete free to anyone who wants to start their own mastermind group. (Manuals, Materials, Website, Web-links etc.)

[mattk]

Hoe about promoting your travel forum on other active, but non-travel related forums?

[Toon]

There are some good forums I came across whilst asking myself the same question.

www.theadminzone.com
www.communityadmins.com
www.adminfusion.com

I hope these help.

To get your forum more active all of the above links offer post exchanges where you post on someone elses forum and they post on yours. This gets the forum more active and would make more people want to take part and register.

[sapphirewebdesign]

Darren,

I have had a look at your forum and it appears that your website has not been optimized to deal with search engines. Until this has taken place it is very unlikely that you website will rank particularly high.

We offer website maintenance packages which work on your website on a monthly basis to maximise your websites potential. For a limited time we are offering free web hosting with these packages. Is this something you might be interested in?

Kind regards

Ryan

sales@sapphirewebdesign.co.uk

[broadband-engine]

Hi

If you want to ramp up the number of posts why not try this
http://www.aardvarkinternet.net/chat/

basically this is a network of forum owners who contribute fully to each others forums... it is a good way of creating lots of interest on the forum and will naturally lead to more registered users as they get involved in the discussion. I gave my money saving forum a kick start using this.

All the Best