Thank you for all of the contributions to this discussion. I'm going to highlight @
fitkoh's as he has done an excellent summary of some of the points that have been raised, in their order of importance, as well as added more of his own.
I'd just like to add a few comments of my own. I've been around in discussion Forums like these for a very long time. I've found in every one of them that members tend to come and go. There is a particular use for them, such as a VPS or a shared hosting account and if they are into making posts they enjoy it for a while, and then they start to get bored and move to different pastures. A very small group may have developed a loyalty to the Forum that has become a routine, so they always stay. Some of them may have a great difficulty to write posts.
Any way, it's a given that people come and go. But one thing that did stand out was the power of SEO such as I've seen at Gigarocket. The owner is an SEO Specialist by trade from the UK, earns his living from it. One of his objectives of having the Forum and hosting business was a testing ground for his SEO skills. He was able to create magic with traffic. Particularly since the traffic, was paying bills. On the downside of the Forum was 99% of the new subscribers were of the spam and quickly come and go variety. Some made it to the 10 posts (that barely made it to quality) to get a shared hosting account. And didn't even use the account. The number of serious hosted members were very few. So yes, SEO works. It definitely helps to pay the bills from a traffic point of view. On the down side I had to use myBB's Purge Spammer tool very heavily. On average at least 2-5 new signups a day had to be spam purged at the peak of traffic. These subscribers were having fun with messing up the Board with iffy one word and smiley posts. Thank goodness for the Purge Spammer tool. At the same time, a Board like this needs to be very carefully monitored.
I don't know what the owner of Gigarocket did with SEO. I think he had his group of SEO Websites that he listed Gigarocket on. And kept that up to date. I knew when he had done work on it, as he did the updates sporadically and then that was when a new wave of spam subscribers hit the Forum. I think he went careful with backlinks, as it bit Gigarocket in the foot more than once. If one gets bad backlinks from porn or other not so good sites (which is what can happen if you register with iffy SEO Websites), it can create issues with the Data Centre. There are backlinks and backlinks and Dynamo has been trying to get quality back links the legitimate way through the VPSs. It is a condition of having the VPS that if there is a Website on it, then links have to be created to post4vps and the sponsor of the VPS.
I'd like to suggest that we ask @
xdude for his advice. @
xdudes an SEO specialist himself and could perhaps advise on which SEO Websites post4vps could register with. Alternatively @
Dynamo could also contact the owner of Gigarocket on a fee basis as he freelances his SEO efforts through
https://sitebee.co.uk/
I also like the idea about tackling the social media. In our case I think the kind of members we need would be mostly in Discord and LowEndTalk. So if we could find an energetic Discord enthusiast who could check in where he/she feels natural to be, and then just do a word about where to get free VPSs for posts in exchange that would be very helpful. I know there are a few members of post4vps who are very active in Discord. If they could help us that way it would go a long way in spreading the word.
The owner of Gigarocket focused a lot on Facebook. He created a Facebook link so new subscribers could log into the Forum via Facebook. Again, it obviously worked for added traffic, but wow, the spam subscriptions were enormous. They came in floods.
(12-05-2020, 06:34 PM)fitkoh Wrote: The biggest opportunity as I think @Mashiro mentioned in shoutbox not long ago, we need more on topic posts about what people are doing with their vps. The topics like anime, music, and movies keep the forum active but don't do much for search rankings.
This is an excellent point. I remember at Gigarocket in the earlier years when the Tech Admin was still very active, our Hosting Support Forum was private like we have most of our support requests here private as well. As part of the owner's SEO effort (this usually happened sporadically in huge energy efforts) the owner opened this Forum to make it public. So yes, there is an opportunity to do something with the private support discussions. Maybe open it up and find a way to make them less revealing in details. I wonder whether there is a myBB app one could use that would make certain content of a post only visible to those with privileges to read it - like IPs and such. But yes, our support discussions are a valuable resource for potential traffic for sure.
Another possibility is to add a new Forum where members show case their VPS Projects or share their learning experiences or latest how-to discoveries in a meaningful way. And in exchange for that earn X number of posts - i.e. Dynamo could set it up so that those making posts of a certain length in this Forum will earn two to three posts instead of 1 posts. Obviously the posts would need to be X length with X content. A template would need to be provided to ensure original and quality content vs copy paste. But yes, we need to find ways to share VPS experiences more for added traffic. And reward those making the posts at the same time.
(12-05-2020, 06:34 PM)fitkoh Wrote: As far as publicity goes, there isn't much better publicity than a giveaway. Since we have so much stock, we could run a monthly giveaway in an effort to build the userbase. We could advertise on a more popular forum (lowendtalk for instance) and offer 1 (or more) vps for free for a month, and ask for a review at the end of the term. Registration on p4v could be a requirement, and once registered people would be more likely to post, and winners could have the opportunity to keep the vps long term if they choose to post and meet the hosting requirement at the end of the month.
This is a good point @
fitkoh. We have a whole cache of VPSs that are not working for any one. We need to do something with those. Lowendtalk is an excellent suggestion. Along with Discord. I'd prefer it to be something however that needs to be worked for so that it doesn't distract from the post4vps principle or even compete with those who are making their monthly posts. Like the new member with the most posts for the month would be a good example. Also, there are members who are making quality posts in excess of the 20 posts that are needed. We should find a way to reward them as well. This may well be a way to do this.
