May
Ignoring my community sites
Over the past month or so … pretty much since college hoops ended… I haven’t been paying as much time to my Gator Forum or my Mass Effect Forum. Traffic has died died considerably on the Gator site mostly because there are no sports to talk about right now. No spring football practice, no more recruiting, more more basketball… summer months are slow for sure.
The thing about forums is you can’t leave them out to dry. I’ve learned that the hard way in the past. Whether you have mods/admins or not, as an owner you still need to be active in the community. People look up to you and expect you to be there.
I really need to kick start my Gator site. It made me over $100 in April, so really it’s not something I should ignore. It has potential to be a big time community, I just need to put the man hours into recruiting members. It will be a lot easier once football comes back, but until then I need to keep the forum populated so that by the time football does start, there is a solid member base.
It’s hard work, but I’m going to try and dedicate an hour a day to building this site. It gets around 100 uniques/day currently. If I can just get that to 500-1000/day, then I know I could turn it into a big money maker… around $500/month.
Mass Effect on the other hand is a bit different. It’s a forum for a game that hasn’t come out yet. And the publisher, BioWare, doesn’t release a lot of information on it. It’s hard for me to build discussion topics on a game I don’t know a lot about. Hopefully as it gets closer to launch I will start getting more members who want to be involved in the game. The official Mass Effect forums are pretty active… if only I could find a way to attract some of their members to come to my site without spamming anything.
I would be very patient with your Mass Effect website, if the game comes even close to living up to the hype, it could really gain a huge amount of popularity. Good luck. It is hard I would say if you have a multitude of sites to give appropriate attention to each. You always have your favorites to work on, and that can be difficult.
I think your just hitting the summer doldrums. During these times I think it’s good to put your communities in the mindset for what will be coming in a few more months. Try to build anticipation for the future. I think this might be one way forward.
it definitely take time to develop a forum, especially now that u spent e money on it, look for ways to refresh it. e.g. plugins, new moderators, pple to run ur forums, contest, etc.