Psychology of forum participation

[temi]

I am still trying to figure out how to make some of our visitors register and participate, has any other forum owner worked out an ingenuous technique for converting visitors to registered members?

Let the search engines index everything inside the forum so it can be found, but make some parts of the forum inaccessible unless you're a registered user (tutorials and stuff in example).
Although that's a little bit drastical.

[Lorna]

Originally Posted by temi

I am still trying to figure out how to make some of our visitors register and participate, has any other forum owner worked out an ingenuous technique for converting visitors to registered members?

I am trying to work this out myself! Also, trying to keep people participating!

If you find the secret formula, please let me know!

[temi]

I will share the secret with you Lorna should I manage to crack it

[OldWelshGuy]

Take a look at popular forums and try to work out why.
My advice is PASSION. ignite the passion of people and you will have a busy forum. Keep it clean, be strict on spam posts, send private emails to new members thanking them for joinging. By private I mean if they put a site in the link visit it and mention it in the email.

Make them feel at home

I do it with my rugby forum and it seems to be working ok. To bolster visits, email out now and again a quick email thanking them for being a member at the forum, and list a couple of good threads with links so they can visit from the email.

My rugby forum past 1/3 of a million posts this morning

[temi]

I learnt two new tricks from your post... the one about passion and personalised greetings, I think I will try that, instead of automated welcome email I will try a more personal approach, thanks for that.
You rugby forum is a runaway success, you will probably hit 1 million post this year.
I am hopping we will achive 5,000 threads at this forums. I tends to look at the threads rather than the post count

[funkypilchard]

I would say these are my suggestions from an outside perspective.

1. Keep it simple, main topics should be listed in simplistic terms then sub categories off each, this forum is very big and there are many different forums which is good to know, I think the trick is to try to index and condense subjects coherently, so anything to do with SEO whether it be Google pr, directories anything that comes primarily under that title should be under one roof... then programming, with things like beginners, php etc etc under another.

2. Don't keep areas secret, let people follow the threads in entirety... let them read the whole story so that they become enticed and come back to see a response on a subject, eventually they may register and reply.

3. Unfortunately forums at the top of google are going to do it for me as they are not specifically important enough at first glance to search through pages of the same thing so the ones at the top I will assume are the best (sorry if that sounds simplistic)

4. Encourage a general discussion area like in here, it allows people to take a break from what they are doing elsewhere on the forum or even elsewhere on the net.

5. Maybe have a header image that is changed daily or weekly or monthly relating to the forum... it gives a forum identity and gives the impression its fresh instead of the same old text all the time.

6. The truth is that many people tend to register somewhere but will hardly ever post, it's a scary thing to some people, others will read but never consider posting a comment on a forum.

7. This forums strength IMO and one that should be pushed is how helpful every one is. Push this fact with SEO, free advice for beginners, then once they are hooked and learn the tricks of the trade they may feel obliged to return the favour, stay and help others.

[OldWelshGuy]

My rugby forum has slipped, it is no longer #1 for 'rugby forum' #1 for loads of other phrases though.

Temi, as an aside but on topic, consider renaming thrteads that are meaningless. I often do this as it helps the page rank.

[temi]

FP,
Thanks for your contribution, I completely agree with you about keeping the looks fresh, I need to work on that. I remeber forums that I have not been to for 1 or more year, getting there and still finding the same looks and structure, though the forum was alive with discussion it seemed dead to me.
I will have to look into how not to fall in that trap. Yes, we will be pushing out blogs help section, Melky is starting a very good tutorial tomorrow.

[temi]

Originally Posted by OldWelshGuy

Temi, as an aside but on topic, consider renaming thrteads that are meaningless. I often do this as it helps the page rank.

Thanks for that suggestion, I try to do that all the time even completely annihilate forum that are meaningless as well.
If you spot one that I missed please point my attention to it.