I have been trying to get our "college forum" started, but it has been a very slow process. So far here are the advertising attempts we have made.

1) Flyers at local colleges
2) Adwords
3) Linkswap with a large, college humor site
4) Paid advertising on offtopic.com
5) myspace page with 260 members
6) posting on various other college forums
7) Responding to college news blogs with link
8) Adding new content to our forum on a regular basis.
9) Giving away a digital camera to whoever can refer the most members

We started our site last may and it has only yielded about 50 members. Only about 5 or 6 are active.

What else can be done to attract members and get them to participate?

http://www.collegecolosseum.com

Sorry, didn't see the sticky at the top. If this needs to be merged please do so.

Well first of all...

Your forum is huge, it has too many Boards, which make user probably see the first couple and then go away because the never reach the end.

Second,

You should get a new template with a more professional design.

Below are my thoughts:
1. Layout Is a tad plain...Blue on yellow is not a good approach.
2. Name is hard to remember.
3. Give it time, some people may not have had time to visit yet.
4. Content wise it's nice, I loved http://www.collegecolosseumcontent.c...g_by_microsoft

Hi there

As somone has mentioned above your site isnt easy on the eye, and the threads shown on ur homepage dont catch the eye, but really ur main problem is you have far too many categorys, i have never seen so many in my life, even really popular forums dont have that many, you have to think of a way to have less !

Its best to start off with a few categorys and as your forum gains posters, you can add more later.

Also general forums are notoriously hard to promote, you need to be clear who your forum is aimed at.

Woc

I think you need a COMPLETE website redesign and a shorter domain. I don't know what software you're using but the BEST is Vbulletin.

To get more visitors to your website, trade links with college related websites to push up your Page Rank on Google. You should also add a "blog" relating to colleges to your site so you can use social bookmarking techniques such as Digg to generate traffic. Also, change your "title" description to include more key phrases that college students might be looking for. One good key phrase would probably be "facebook forum" since most college students are on Facebook. Write a good article and submit it to about 100 article directories. After you're done, write another article and repeate the same process.

Oh, here we go with the link exchange BS again. And let's add blogs, social bookmarking, and article submission WITHOUT factoring in why those things work: because it's the content, not the medium.

The one area that freelancevote is right is the redesign. collegec, you asked the same question from an SEO angle a couple of weeks ago, and the issues that were pointed out to you then overlap with these ones. You either need to start looking at your site from the hybrid SEO/user angle (SEO without interfering with the user experience or even maximizing it) or you need to hire someone, such as a vangogh or a chrishirst who does (and no, not me, I'm not looking).

In other words, start from the SEO/user angle and many of your traffic woes, if not all of them, get solved.

Wow, that has got to be the longest list of forums i've ever seen.

When you are first starting out it helps to only have a few because it creates the illusion of having more traffic.

If you dont want to lose all the forums, see if they can be collapsable, so users dont have to scroll all the way down. But if it was me id get ride of all the forums except the general forums until you get some traffic.

I was hoping a complete site redesign wasn't needed, but I guess thats my only option. I'll look into getting a new site together.

As for the long list of boards; it is collapsable, but only if you are a member.

Originally Posted by scorch

Wow, that has got to be the longest list of forums i've ever seen.

u and i both bud, WOW! Lose the forums or lose people's interests in the forum, that simple.

Do you think it would be beneficial to only make the general category viewable to users and then make all the state categories only open to registered memebers?

The main thing that makes our site unique is the forums we have set for every school. However, I also don't want that to be what prevents our site from taking off.

After a quick glance I'm not really sure what your forum is "for" - quite often the best forums have a quite narrowly scope that will attract enough members quickly enough to build a set of active threads.

If your original set of members are active and friendly enough people will come back, if people make posts and they don't get any responses for a long time then they won't bother coming back.

The problem is unless you have a niche then there are plenty of other more active forums out there. I guess with yours you need some sort of marketing effort related to each specific college campus to ensure that a number of participants from each are attracted, I doubt too many people from Dominican University are too bothered about what is being posted in the Washington Theological Union forum.