Increasing Traffic

Hey everyone,

I own a little community called pokevolution.net and was wondering how all of you suggest I increase user traffic. I have been upgrading our forum, trying to increase our blog posts, and posting more on social media, but sadly nothing has worked.

Thank you for any suggestions any of you have.

I have just visited your forum, it loads rather slow for the first time.

Its background color is too strong and I would suggest should change this.

If you are looking for ways to increase traffic for your site, best way is finding relevant forums and social networks to promote.

In other words, SEO is a stable way to increase traffic to your site daily without spending any money. Our forum is mainly getting traffic from this source(search engines) I would recommend you go with SEO.

Hope that helps!

Your WordPress blog is a big turn off for me, because each page takes 5-10 seconds to load. To make matters worse, I'm staring at a white screen whilst I wait:


It seems your WordPress theme has a preloader in place. So the page doesn't display anything until it finishes downloading 100%. I think you might be losing visitors from this.

Forum looks good and loads quick.

What is your advertising strategy? Looking specifically at your Pokémon niche, your main competitors would be huge forums such as Serebii and PokeCommunity. Basically, do you have something unique that might compel someone to join your community over theirs?

Noticed you have a WordPress blog as well on the front page. I personally think having a blog is a double-edged sword. It is good if you have lots of news articles but it might be detracting visitors away from your forum because you are encouraging visitors to leave comments via Disqus or on your Twitter instead of your forum...below each article.

Not being harsh here, just honest.

What does your forum/site offer that the hundreds of other Pokemon sites don't? I see nothing really.

SEO is good, traffic is good, but there is no reason for that traffic to stick around that I can see.

What does the "Gaming" category have to do with the Pokemon niche? Not to mention they may as well be empty.
What does the "Media" category have to do with the Pokemon niche?. No reason for it to be there either.

I would remove all of your non-niche boards and direct those posts to your "Everything Else" forum. Bring back the categories/forums later as activity necessitates.


Separately - your landing page is very inefficient. Huge vertical space taken for each article and lots of scrolling needed.

Do your articles have a forum thread linked? And article comments as thread replies? If not I'd recommend IP.Pages to make this easier. Wordpress looks good, and is easy, but you're essentially trying to drive participation in 2 separate communities.

Optic said:

What is your advertising strategy? Looking specifically at your Pokémon niche, your main competitors would be huge forums such as Serebii and PokeCommunity. Basically, do you have something unique that might compel someone to join your community over theirs?

Click to expand...

My advertising strategy is that we are willing to grow and innovate through new features, and ideas unlike our competitors, who as far as I can tell haven't done a whole lot to change themselves in quite some time. But to be specific one thing our competitors don't have is a trading database where our members can request or post Pokémon they are either looking for or want to get trade off.

itommy said:

I have just visited your forum, it loads rather slow for the first time.

Click to expand...

Optic said:

Your WordPress blog is a big turn off for me, because each page takes 5-10 seconds to load. To make matters worse, I'm staring at a white screen whilst I wait:


It seems your WordPress theme has a preloader in place. So the page doesn't display anything until it finishes downloading 100%. I think you might be losing visitors from this.

Click to expand...

Thanks for pointing that out I now notice that it takes quite some time to load. I will look into fixing the speed, and making it more efficient.

haqzore said:

What does the "Gaming" category have to do with the Pokemon niche? Not to mention they may as well be empty.
What does the "Media" category have to do with the Pokemon niche?. No reason for it to be there either.

I would remove all of your non-niche boards and direct those posts to your "Everything Else" forum. Bring back the categories/forums later as activity necessitates.

Click to expand...

Thanks for pointing that out I will make it more efficient by creating a wider range of Pokémon forums that span out through all the different Pokémon generations.

Optic said:

Noticed you have a WordPress blog as well on the front page. I personally think having a blog is a double-edged sword. It is good if you have lots of news articles but it might be detracting visitors away from your forum because you are encouraging visitors to leave comments via Disqus or on your Twitter instead of your forum...below each article.

Click to expand...

When I did move form IP.Content to Wordpress I also thought that it may make my forum harder to find, so I will try to state in my articles the forum every time, and then place a sidebar that displays a link to the forums.

Homepage:
Lot's of scrolling needed.
Felt like everything was way too big or I was looking through binoculars.
The contact, about us, and link exchange items belong in a footer.

Community:
I have to scroll just to see the first post. Not good.
Zero content above the fold.
Logo too big.

All around
Why don't the homepage and forum navigation match?
Everything is too big.
Barely any content above the fold.
It's definitely not the #1 source of Pokemon, so get a more relevant title that might help you in search engines.

I like that red color though. It's a good shade.

You asked for information and they're all good suggestions on improving your site. You're welcome to disagree, but should be welcome to criticism that can help your site become a much better user experience.

Drastic said:

You asked for information and they're all good suggestions on improving your site. You're welcome to disagree, but should be welcome to criticism that can help your site become a much better user experience.

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I apologize for that I sometimes take criticism too to heart. So I would just like to apologize, and say that I am currently making a list to improve the site so it encourages more user activity, and people to join.