You focus on membership or visitors?

Since I've launched mybforum I've been mostly focusing on membership until few weeks ago when I started working to increase the number of visitors.

I think it was a mistake to spend that much time working to attract members. It is easier to drive traffic to the forum and eventually they will turn into members.

In the last week, my work paid of because my traffic increased by 40% and I got more members registered than usually.

Do you focus to on increase membership or traffic? What have you done when you started your new forum?

 

I spent the greater part of this year focusing on my members and don't get me wrong, I love each and everyone of my members but I am beginning to turn my attention towards visitors because my current memberbase is not the most dedicated(and my staff is not that helpful excluding 2-3) so i am focusing on visitors now to more or less bring in more traffic because eventually that traffic will turn into new members. Growth and visibility is what keeps a forum going.

 

I'm always focused on increasing my member base and visitors. You increase your member base, they'll tell their friends and thus, your visitors will increase as well. I'm always welcoming new users and asking them questions, so that I can build my content. It's all about interaction with a forum and if you don't have much of that, you need to focus on generating conversations on the forum so that you can grow.

It's a catch 22 really, you work on increasing your members, your traffic will go up as well. Members are everything and they're going to be the reason why your forum becomes a hit or a miss.

 

I always interact with members, specially the new ones. I believe, the more messages the new visitors will post in the first week the joined, the more they will be engage quickly in the forum the faster they will feel "part" of the community.

 

Both. Why focus on one or the other?

 

Focusing on one doesn't mean I give up on the other

 

This is true and I agree with you. Which is also why I link members to other threads on the boards to help them get used to the forum atmosphere. It works like a charm because they usually reply to those other topics. New users are critical to a forum's success because they'll help make or break your forum depending on how long they're active and all that. New users can also become veteran members after months of posting, so its just about being friendly and being a laid back admin to keep the atmosphere clean.

 

I found a good way to make members post more is to include a "Recent posts" in the sidebar. It works well for me

 

Well, as you visitors increase then you membership should also. Though, you don't want to neglect the members you currently have. The worst thing you can do is forget about those that joined early and focus on just getting new people. Treat everyone the same and just try to make the best community you can.

 

I have always focused on visitors because not everybody may feel engaged to participate in a community at first but until he or she has visited it several times.

In the mean time, those visitors can always bring some conversions, and eventually become regular members.

 

I currently am focusing on members. Good, quality members are what make a forum successful. Sure, visitors are needed to get members but I am more interested in pleasing my users than getting new ones.

 

We've had that installed on Xenforo and "recent threads" and I agree, they do boast activity.