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journeyoftheanimala · 06-21-2007, 10:53 PM

Hello all. First I would like to say that I hope everyone is doing wonderful with their online ideas. I need some advice.

I own and operate www.journeyoftheanimals.com. Right now the main feature of the site is the forums. There is one very large problem though......it's dead!

I know that one of the best advertisment you could ever ask for is word of mouth. Well how the heck am I to get word of mouth if nobody is talking? I know I have a couple of somewhat faithful followers but even they are not posting much now. There are so many things that can mess with your traffic such as the season (more people gone on vacation during the spring and summer) and other things such as work, school and so on. I would like to do things such as link exchanges since I have a banner rotator in place but who the heck would want to exchange links with a dead site? hehe

I do not know if anyone can offer any advice or not. I guess I just wanted to vent.

EzMac · 06-21-2007, 11:31 PM

If I were you, I'd start off with way less forums than you have currently. I'd start with less than 20 for sure, until you feel the need to expand beyond that or the forums get overcrowded. Also, your homepage is a bit of a turn-off. If I were you, I'd work on that, because right when I saw you homepage, I didn't feel like there was much to see. I would work on it and make it more eye appealing. Hope I helped a little.

rob2009 · 06-21-2007, 11:42 PM

Way too many catergories for the forum.

When someone goes to it,all they see is 0 posts, 0 posts,0 posts, 0 posts,0 posts, 0 posts.....So stop having empty forums. Make about 5 catergories that are vague, that way people see numbers other than 0, even though theres not a lot of catergories.

DrMoney · 06-21-2007, 11:59 PM

Agree....with Rob

zoobie · 06-22-2007, 09:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rob.rawls

Way too many catergories for the forum.

We want to see a lot of posts than a lot of categories with empty threads.

rob2009 · 06-22-2007, 12:03 PM

You cant expect someone to post in an empty category, they want to post where people will actually read it, so if you condense your forum to 5-6 categories, then people will see posts and participate.

MTbiker · 06-22-2007, 12:23 PM

Once you get the categories straightened out you could hire paid forums posters to get things rolling.

nicegrl78 · 06-22-2007, 03:00 PM

Jota..take it from someone who's dealt with a forum site...you should try to cut down on some of the threads. Because its such a relatively new site you should just stick to topics that you feel your viewers can relate to and as the site grows you can begin to add more stuff. Just my opinion...Kudos on the site.

EzMac · 06-22-2007, 03:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MTbiker

Once you get the categories straightened out you could hire paid forums posters to get things rolling.

Paid forum posters really don't help a lot. They aren't going to be quality posts and the members will not continue posting afterwards. Sorry, but I just don't think it'll help very much in the long run.

clp11479 · 06-22-2007, 08:01 PM

i'm looking at your site in IE and the banner is covering part of your paragraph.

also, may want to consider a navigation bar instead of the text links on the right hand side. at first i was confused and didn't know where to click for forums (since most navigations are in the middle or on the left).

just my two cents.

journeyoftheanimala · 06-25-2007, 09:57 PM

Hello. I just wanted to thank everyone for the wonderful advice they have been giving me about my site. I am still working on putting some of it to action. I just wanted to know what you thought of this menu that I have now put in place.

Well this is a test index and is not live yet. Oh and should I just ditch the Google ads on the main site?

http://journeyoftheanimals.com/index2.php