A bit lost and looking for direction/advice

I decided to cross-post this on a few of my favorite admin sites because I'd love a wide range of helpful suggestions.

The Current Version of my site has been around Since Feb 2012(the original version was made in October 2011 on Forumotion) and overall it is a good site....Early 2012 had a lot of bumps and it was quite hellish towards the middle of 2012 and i had considered giving up on it but I pushed on and since October the site has been doing so well.

700 members & 200,000 Posts in the span of a year is pretty cool for a site my size with only about 30-50 daily active users.

However, I sort of feel a bit lost with the site. Posting is fine but it doesn't really have a purpose....like it's just a general discussion forum and that was never my intent.

When it was on Forumotion....our site was created around YA fiction series "Gone" by Michael Grant. It was built to be a direct competitor to the largest Gone forum...and we actually did very well(and still are).

After leaving forumotion in Feb 2012, we started over with premium software and we kept Gone as our flagship book series...meaning Gone was our site's bread and butter. All members who joined our site pretty much read Gone.

Our domain was related to the book....

Except...we also had other book forums for Hunger Games, The Mortal Instruments, The Enemy, etc etc.

About June 2012, I decided i wanted to be a little more original and change the focus of our site from Gone to another book series called "Rot & Ruin"....our site's name also then changed to match Rot & Ruin.

Unfortunately, that didn't really do much to bring in much traffic and I decided around October 2012 to choose a name that wasn't surrounding around one particular book.

Rising Chaos

This name has NOTHING to do with books, it has nothing at all to do with our niche....it more or less describes our site's demeanor. Our site is Chaos but not the bad kind...it's chaos in the sense that unlike a lot of sites there aren't a lot of rules and restrictions. People are free to be themselves and it is a bit disorganized but it works for us.

But i am feeling lost and confused. I have no intention of giving up on this site and I have a dedicated memberbase who are quite supportive and like my 2nd family so I work hard for them.

But i'm lost.

Our site literally has no purpose....We are supposed to be a book forum.
We have forums for 10-12 book series...yet if you combine all posts in those forums they don't even make up HALF of our general discussion forum.

The site is more social general talk stuff.....and that's okay I don't mind that.

But i want it to have a purpose.

I want to bring it back to the roots of what it was.....and some of my members want to go back to where it was driven first and foremost by our love of BOOKS.

My friend said that he thinks I should change the domain from our current name, The Rising Chaos, because it does nothing to describe to what our site is about and he believes that our site has horrible page ranking because the domain name doesn't actually have anythign at all to do with books.

I've brainstormed a name that i think would work best if i do decide to change it but my question is

Should I go forward and keep sticking with The Rising Chaos(which doesn't describe our niche at all) which makes it harder for me to advertise that yes it is a book forum....

or should i just start anew with the potential domain name i chose that actually does directly deal with BOOKS?

I want my site to be a site that has a reputation and is growing...Not just a site where we're basically just there.

Our page ranking is when it comes to trying to find our site using keywords...and I am not sure if The Rising Chaos name is helping much.I am wondering if a rebrand with a rename would fit best for us......and of course give me a chance to find our way.

Or should I stick with the name even if it literally has nothing to do with us.

 

I believe you should keep the name, it'd be a good source of traffic. While you're looking for purpose in your forum, I suggest that you have yourself or another staff member go and clean up all the threads, if nothing more, create a category for general talk to keep the book area clean and book related. Then, start promotions on your site to get more individuals to refer more people. The more people, the more the purpose of the site, however, it may still seem as if there is no purpose to the site, this might remain in place but you should think of how it would feel of to you if it had purpose or not.

 

It really looks to me like you already have a niche, young adults who like to read book series, maybe more specifically science fiction? If it's working for you, why keep messing with it? I wouldn't be overly concerned that your off-topic section has the most posts, people show up for the content about their favorite book series, and stay for the camaraderie in the off-topic sections.