Everyplace but the forums

I get a pretty decent number of visitors to my main website; about 12-14k a month. Which I know isn't the greatest in the world, but for a very specialized topic and something I built with only word of mouth, it makes me happy. I added a forum about a year and a half ago, and I'm starting to get more members joining, and more members talking, but it never seems to really keep growing at a self sustaining pace. I'll get people joining, getting excited, then disappearing. I do have it set to autosubscribe people to threads, which I think helps, but only so much.

Here is the part that kills me, I have branding all over my site to go to the forums. Instead, people email me, message me on facebook, and post comments on articles that are general questions not related to the article they are posting on; I've tried many different ways telling people "hey, use the forums! That's what they're there for!)"

The forum gets a few hundred visitors a month compared to the thousands on the main site.

I ran a contest last year that helped a lot at the time, but users faded away. I'll probably try again this year, but I'm not sure it won't be the same results, with initial interest and then people disappearing again.

I'd love to hear what other people have done in similar circumstances.

 

Oh yeah, and people get really mad if you suggest to them they should use the forum over emailing you. Like you asked if you could punch them in the jimmies. It doesn't matter how much help I give or how I ask; gee wiz, people really expect you to spend a lot of time answering questions but won't take the time to sign up for your forum.

 

It happens. Maybe an announcement saying that in order to help more people you prefer to answer questions in the forum rather than via PM.
Then you can always refer back to it as a type of rule.

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I think we all get this. We also have people asking for help in an urgent desperate way and so we drop everything and assist them, many do not even acknowledge or say thanks, but this is life. Fortunately they are counteracted by those who are grateful and do post sincere thanks. This is just part of being an admin.

I think the saying is: "This is how the cookie crumbles"

 

Meh, it happens. If you open a forum or community as part of any site, you'll generally find one of two things happen:

1. The forum/community feature becomes the focus of the website and gets many more visitors than the latter.

2. It becomes rather inactive in contrast, and ends up kind of dead.

Don't ask me why it happens, but it's happened with many, many websites in a similar situation.

 

Have you tried adding a link to your forum in your email's signature? Please ask all your questions -insertforumnamehere- and we'll try our best to help you. When I had a main site, I didn't really have this issue, users went to the forums instead. How many places on your website is your forum linked? Is it very visable?