This is what kills me! I might be able to fix it?

When my Downriver Michigan forum was a blog I was getting 50~250+ unique a day. That was back in 2010, in 2011 I merged it with a Michigan forum and it crippled the website over night and it never recovered.

So I let the domain expire and then I picked the domain back up in 2013 and turned it into a forum and its been a painful process getting it going again. Now granted I do not have as many stories as the blog. But for what ever reason I am not getting the same searches I was when it was a blog (for the same stories).

Today I had a brain storm and registered another Downriver domain name. And I am thinking about making it a blog and covering different topics that are not covered on my forum and linking my forum to the blog.

So basically I want to reel them in with the blog and send them to the forum in hopes of picking up more traffic for the forum. I also plan on writing at least 4 new stories a week for the forum and I am going to try and do the same for the blog. Do you guys think this idea will work?

Greg

 

For now I have decided to hold off and try and make my stories feature rich. I am going to give it 6 months to see if anything happens. Hopefully I am not wasting time.

Greg

 

Well I am never going to close the website down unless I go broke. But I may make Wordpress the front end of the website. Personally I think I screwed up by not doing it to begin with. The 8wayrun portal is nice, but it doesn't have the SEO power of Wordpress.

Greg

 

too many changes to software and layout might 'turn off' returning visitors.

 

Maybe, I only have 14 members now and there not even really that active and the forum is 2 months old. I don't want to throw in the towel, so I am going to have to try something different to get this forum going.

Greg

 

I'd suggest to have a backlog of content ready to go. With my upcoming project I'm making sure I have tons of backlogged articles written and discussions posted into the forums before launch, and that is quite a ways off(2014).

Backlogging frees up time as you only need to pull from the backlog and can focus on other aspects of the website in the meantime.

Try to understand that local forum communities can be a hard thing to get started but once their going they sore. This is mainly because your narrowing your demographic to current or former interested residents of the municipality.

I'm sure with some hard work it'll take off.