New forum - need tips for members?

[Chris369]

www.videogame-news.com/forum

I'm finding it really hard to get people to sign up, most the people that have are members of my gaming clan and then most of them post once and don't come back!

I get around 200-300 visits to the main news site on an average day but none of them sign up. I think I need to make the forum more obvious .. I was thinking of one of those yellow bars at the top (like activex warning) that says theres a forum competition on, sign up to take part etc but I don't know how you make them!

Any other tips?

[Reckless]

link from the main site to your forum, tell about it in a post.

lest say your posting something about a new Xbox360 game, and there's also a topic about that game in your forum(you can make it of course), link to it, tell people about that topic

and most people don't sign up to an almost empty forum, get some friends to post

[Chris369]

Yeah that sounds like a good idea, I will start linking to forum posts :)

I've started creating my own forum accounts to get some discussion going lol.

Got my brother and some others posting too.

[Submerge]

Make the link to your forum in a different color, maybe a bright red? Also, fill your forum homepage with extra content, I don't see descriptions on some forum categories.

[Chris369]

I've added descriptions to those categories now :)

[Submerge]

Looks a lot nicer now, the other improvements I'd suggest is a totally new header. The colors are contrasting to the layout (they're dark). Also, the orange mouse-over affect on the categories isn't all appealing. I'd suggest a little bit darker blue (close to the current blue hue). That way the mouse-over affect isn't distracting the visitor to much.

[Mystic]

I was a mod of one forum. It wasnt really getting started. So, the admin got one guy to create and post about 5 good photoshop tuts. Then these were submitted to websites like Good-Tutorials.com . They got huge number of visitors, and many actually did sign up. Offcourse not all of them were active. But, in the end we did get a some active new members.
For your forum, you can create gaming guides/ walkthrough, mods/patches etc.
Unique content is important. People wont join if your forum mostly has content/news sourced from elsewhere.

Other tip I would give is to make proper use of Web2.0 sites like StumbleUpon and Digg. Create good content, submit them. You would get hits if the content is good (Bizzare/Funny content have a greater chance of becoming popular).

Simulteneously, have contests. If you cant afford to spend much, giveaway something relatively cheap like domain and hosting. You would be surprised to know how many people want them.

[Chris369]

I'm giving a way a game when we get to 100 members. Hasn't really had much attention though.

I gave Digg ago and didn't get that much traffic so I use n4g.com (news4gamers) instead and that gets me loads if I can get my news from press releases and submit it before someone else ;)

[Mystic]

I registered at your forum and glanced through some of the contents.
If someone doesnt check "About VideoGame News" section, he probably wont even know about the contest.
Put up info about the contest somewhere prominent. Like this website has it, in the header.

I would also suggest, that you enable signature, and put info about the contest in your signature. So, that someone visits a thread from another website, he notices the signature and is atleast made aware of the contest.

[Chris369]

I had a yellow bar at the top of the main news site (like this - http://www.xbox360fanboy.com/) stating that there was a competition but it didn't attract any new signups.

I'll add it to my sig as well, might put the bar back too.

[Sunfrog]

Will you ship to the states? Do we get to pick the game?

[Chris369]

Yes on both counts.

Or I guess I could give the option of £30 (~ $60) via PayPal. Won't have to wait and then you could get a game that isn't out here yet ;)