I have a website on my hands with great potential. I’ve been sitting on Mass Effect Forum for months now, and haven’t really done much to it. The forum is completely dead right now, with no active members. It’s time to turn this project around.

Mass Effect launches for the Xbox 360 on November 20th. It’s part of a planned trilogy of games, so this forum definitely has long lasting ability. Halo 3 comes out this month… that’s like 6 years after Halo 1. Imagine how popular a forum could grow in 6 years time. I have an awesome opportunity to turn my forum into the leading source for Mass Effect discussions. Of course it will be very hard competing with the official game forum, but their forums can’t offer members the bonus features that a Vbulletin forum can.

I want to give Mass Effect Forum my full, undivided attention over the new 2-3 weeks. I plan to use some forum marketing tips to drive up memberships.

If you visit the site, you will already notice that I am using a new style. The previous one had a few bugs in it that I could not fix. The solution… a new style. With the new style, I also upgraded the forum software from vb 3.6.4 to 3.6.8. I uninstalled all the previous products & plugins and re-installed new upgraded versions. One of the coolest plugins I’ve added is the Xbox Live Leaderboard. Of course, my gamertag is the only one listed on it, because there are no other active members.

I’ll start my forum marketing with simple link exchanges. Since my site is PR3, it shouldn’t be too hard to find some decent gaming link exchanges. The only space I have on my site for links is in the footer. Hopefully that won’t hurt my chances of finding good links too bad. The next marketing strategy will be hitting myspace. Myspace still remains one of the best places to recruit members for a forum. After that, a contest may be my next best chance. The forum is dead, but the site still gets traffic. About 10-15 unique visitors a day come to my site, they just need a lttle incentive to sign up and post. Giving away a free copy of the game may set me back $60, but in the long run (think 6 years), it would definitely be worth it.

I know I talk a lot, and have very little to show for it. I dedicated a ton of time to Gator Envy and looking at it right now there have been 30 members online in the last 24 hours. That’s double from where it was a month ago. I think I can do the same thing with Mass Effect Forum.