gflex1 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 13, 2018 5:34 pm
My father has a fishing club. A couple years ago I created him a discussion forum and it was running great. It has about 150 active users. I know that these numbers are very low, but this forum has no social media ads, no active work on a local market.
I wouldn't suggest paying for social media adverts. It would be far better to concentrate on making your forum better, than paying for adverts.
gflex1 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 13, 2018 5:34 pmBut now I see that this forum is dead....no active users in about 2 years....:/ This problem is that there was some problems in club administration so it reflected negatively on a discussion forum too.
It is a shame about the problems with club administration. If you have forum members turning against administrators and moderators, it can make for an atmosphere where people feel a division and think that the forum staff are against them.
I don't want to pry into the business of your father's club, but has this dispute spilled out onto the forums you set up? If you have topics where people are insulting forum staff...or where forum staff are insulting forum members...or where forum members are insulting each other, that could be a turn off to potential newbie members.
You can not erase the past, but you don't have to wave the past in the faces of people who had no play in it.
I won't tell you to go on a delete-fest, but have a think about how you can make sure people know:
- It is a new era,
- Things are different and
- You are ready to have new people talk about fishing.
gflex1 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 13, 2018 5:34 pmHow can I do to make this forum alive again? I started to work on club's social media, on a main website and refresh things.
If you can get some good discussions going, you can certainly share some topics over to Facebook, Google+, Twitter or anything else you are setting up for your father's club.
I wonder if you want to limit your forum just to your father's club, or if you might be better off making your father's club a specialist area within your forum (and aiming to pull in people that are in other fishing clubs).
You need to have new content, and if the forum is not so active, it might be you and a few other people at first.
Can you do things like write reviews of fishing rods or other fishing equipment? If you can think of things that do not directly conflict with your dad's fishing club, that might give you some ideas for topics that are interesting enough that people might surf in off the back of a Google search.
If you are going to have content on your main website, perhaps you could add a link at the bottom of articles inviting people to discuss whatever the article is about (and then link to an "official fishing club topic" dedicated to that specific article (with the "official topics" also linking back to the article they are about).
Maybe you could do some fun things, like have forum ranks named after different fish.
Good luck!