Forum promotion needed!

Activity on the main site is continuing to rise, with over 1,500 unique visitors accessing the site every day, but the activity on the forum, even among regular members has dropped off a lot in the past month. We are sometimes only getting a couple of posts in a single day.

I know a lot of this is due to the time of year. In the winter months the forum activity is always much higher, with members stuck inside on dark cold evenings, whereas now the weather is nicer we are all tending to stay outside much later enjoying the sun and lighter evenings.

But we all do need to think of ways we can attract more members to join the site, and more ways to get members to post, plus getting new visitors to join. All thoughts and ideas are welcome. Please post all the ideas you each might have in case they can be used.

Since the addition of links from the main site home page to the forum, we are now getting on average over 70 unique visitors looking at the site each day, but they are not joining or posting. We need to think up ways that will get them posting. What makes you each join a new forum? and what attracts you to post?

One idea that does work is to get classicamiga advertised on other sites. The affiliate program I have planned will hopefully help with this, but I am waiting for the code needed for this to work to be completed. It is promised to be released for Joomla at the end of this month, so that should help the site out once it is up and running. I will then be contacting other sites to try and get them to share links with us to cross promote both sites. Other site owners are normally more willing to do this than just add a link to their site for you.

In addition, getting classicamiga into signatures on other forums works. If you are a member of any other retro or gaming forum please add classicamiga to your signatures to help promote the site and forum. I will be creating lots of new classicamiga adbanners for sites and forum signatures when I add the new affiliate program to the main site. Once they are live, if you can add these banners to your signatures on other forums that will be great.

I've also found that when I've spent some time thinking up and creating some new Amiga related topics on the forum that the board does come alive and the activity shoots up. A good example was when I spent a couple of hours recently posting lots of Amiga related topics and polls on day. We suddenly had hundreds of posts in a single day which was really great fun. We need to get this kind of activity happening on the forum each week, as new visitors to the site are more likely to take part in the forum posting when there are a lot of new posts happening.

So if each of you can think up just two new Amiga related topics or polls each day it would hopefully ignite the activity on the forum again. If you can't think of anything to post a topic about, post about your favourite games, demos, developers, or get some ideas from other amiga forums ;)

Don't worry. classicamiga is far from unsuccessful. The main site is attracting more and more genuine visitors each month and is becoming very successful, and the forum is active. Most forums I visit are dead with 100 posts in total. It takes something special to get a board active and continuing to be active. We have kept this forum going for over 5 years now and it has always been more a family of friends, than a generic board, something I much prefer to one full of unknown members posting generic Amiga topics (EAB, Amiga.org etc), but I expect you would all agree that if we could get more new members to join and take part it would be even better.

Indeed indeed. So we have the generic topics:

* Fav. game, music, developer, box art etc

So some different topics:

* Longest time spent playing the amiga in one sitting
* First game that corrupted
* First game you finished
* Games that made you angry with frustration
* Wost amiga game
* The games of today traced back to Amiga games

thats all I got at the moment :p

Those are some good suggestions. I will create some threads for some of those now as they could be interesting to discuss. :thumbs: