For those of you who have been following this website forum you know that there are some issues associated with formats and layout. Primarily it is related to comfort levels associated with users who are used to certain forum structures.

In response to this, I recently have attempted to modifiy the theme layout to take a more traditional approach to forum thread displays and layouts and have also modified the default editor for making posts to the BB post language. Of course these can be changed at any time.

It is difficult to make a forum successful and I have done extensive research in the difference between strong forums and weak ones as well as case studies on what is required to make a forum successful. Registering for the forum is completely free and simple to do – but this can only take a forum so far. 

One thing is clear, successful forums require traffic, and traffic is a difficult thing to obtain. It appears that many forum creators do not recommend implementing a forum to a website until it has reached 100,000 pageviews per month. Right now, PCMichiana gets approximately 42,000 – so theoretically we are half way there.

Now of course this isn't an exact translation to the success of this forum. Another big issue that does not translate over from those pageviews is that of those 42,000 – less than 400 pageviews land directly on the forum home page (granted, there are a number of people who land on a sub-page of the forum, but it illustrates a point). 

This forum is not well marketed at this point, and I am open to suggestions and ideas on how to increase the exposure for this web forum as a stand-alone forum for computer help and support. I have spent much effort in marking the homepage of PCMichiana but much less effort in publicizing the forum.

Forum marketing and management are a different beast entirely from standard website marketing and management. I have very little experience in this respect. Right now I am stuck with what I have for the forum structure using the Wordpress Simple-Press Forum plugin. But really this forum should be marketed separate from the primary page (although the primary page links to it).

I honestly believe forum growth has very little to do with the structure of the forum at this point and has far more to do with lack of traffic. If there are only 400 pageviews on the homepage per month then a 1% conversion would only result in 4 new members per month and that doesn't assume those members actually participate in discussions.

Are there any known techniques you have seen work on increasing forum participation and traffic?