Support Forums Starting To Pick Up Nicely

[Omniscient]

Generate false stats. By false i mean not natural stats. A very similar result to paying for posts really.

Sometimes I really wonder if you get it or not. You don't seem to grasp marketing really well.

You're basically saying if a Peanut Butter company gives out coupons for 50% off it's products that the sales aren't real. Doesn't really matter what I do to spark activity. The stats don't lie that we are having NATURAL growth. The award has been in place for months now. The increase in traffic and activity here is because of search engines. Sure we get posts and members because of the award. In effect this creates content. Some of which is actually quality. In turn this gives us better search results which gives us more natural growth. Get it yet?

Members need to hit the report button more as stipulated in an earlier post.

Not really. The LQP here has not been a detrimental problem to the site. Those with a real LQP just get banned and members ignore their benign posts. It's not like HF where people post profanity, flaming and porn. Most of the LQP is simply quick stuff like "thanks that's great". It's not actually harmful just wasteful.

I'm here multiple times per day checking posts and members. If I see a member shooting for the award and has LQP I PM them about it. It's not been anywhere near the problem you might think it is.

Just view memberlist and see new members who have lots of posts. Review their posts and you'll see it's not that bad.
Example: http://www.supportforums.net/search.php?...r&uid=3567

Every site gets it's traffic and start from some point. That's just how it is. SF happens to bleed members from HF. Initially most traffic we recieved was HF referrals. No surprise there. My goal is to have 50% from SE's as HF is. That means that about 1/2 of all visitors are new. This is the growth a site needs. For months SF was only getting 10-15% of it's traffic from SE's. But about when I started this very thread it began to change. Right now SF is very comfortable with 43% from SE's, 24% direct, and 31% referrals. Those are great stats and more indicators that my goals are being met.

One of my next goals is to lower bounce rate which is about 57%. That's higher than I'd like. I'm shooting for 40% in 6 months. You work on bounce rate by viewing the incoming keywords and where they go. Then figure out why they're bouncing and try to change it. You gotta get that one extra site click somehow.

If you think I'm anywhere even close to the end of my bag of tricks you're mistaken. I can make changes to this site for 2-3 more years. A big mistake would be assuming the site in it's current form is how it will be in 2 years. There will be changes rolled out continually that help spark growth and activity.