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I am Closing Down My Vanilla Forum
aery
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Hello All,
Due to lack of traffic and user engagement, I am closing down my forum at http://forum.gtricks.com
I have thought about this very long, I could not decide what to do. Now, it feels that closing down will be a smarter choice.
Can you please check and give your views on whether I should still be running it?
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That's sad. Being on the front page of vanillaforums.org it has always been kind of a poster child for a well-designed Vanilla forum to me.
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Keep it up. You already got something going on there. How many post/articles do you personally submit every week?
Whether you close it down or not, it looks like you've had a good run. Is one reason for closing it down also due to costs of keeping it running?
Also, check out the Vanilla Forums blog. There's some good articles on there about engaging communities. I think @Adrian has some insight on how to keep communities strong as well.
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It is hard to make a successful site, it about more than just software.
The thing is with google stuff, is people don't want to think about it much, they just to find out and do it.
If you were posting about unique solution every day that would be fine. It depend on what area you are focusing on. If it is SEO it is in googles interest to reduce reliance on tricks year on year, and make it more about content.
If you were coming up with unique solution every week the would be one thing.
Maybe it would be best to focus on the next big thing, or broaden your scope.
grep is your friend.
Hi @aery,
Although it's great already, I think your board and website (turn into registrations) have a lot space for improvement. May i allow myself to post some ideas? Ok, i go ahead.
If you still have the motivation they might help to increase activity.
Many people are using mobile, check your gAnalytics for that their bounce rate and try designing your mobile version of Vanilla a little bit better to make it more appealing and less bouncing. Also keep Google Pagespeed in mind when doing so.
The overall gtricks page doesn't not immeadeatly explain what it's about it takes 5-10 seconds to understand (or more)... a bigger subheadline and call to action could do the job. "Your Google Productivity Guide" is kinda small on Desktop and not on mobile, but it explains very well what it's about. Also consider making two large buttons saying "Dive into [Google Tricks and Articles] or the [Community]"
SEO-wise you do not have a great visibility in search engines (but you might had a traffic rise starting in November 2014)... although you do have a nice chance with the words "google desktop" (SERPs around 30) and "chat smiles" in the german area. In the US you are with some keywords at around position 20-25 regarding "delete history search", remove history search" (position 20!!, make that to 2 to 5 and "boom") and so on. Improve on those articles and contents, create more around those topics and linke them to each other to strenghten those... if you have the search term "Google Desktop" in the top 10 leading to one of your articles and a nice button saying "Follow us for more Google Desktop tipps" you could collect a lot of social media followers or feedburner users. From there you can also introduce users to other articles that might be around that topic.
Are you doing regular mailings with Mailchimp for example?
Your headings structure is not good. See category titles. They are h6? They should be H1. Also make your content longer. That will significally increase SERPs.
Improve the design of your forum... don't forget you are competing with Google's own communities (that look shabby). A further improve could lead people to say "ok, that place looks nice and more accessable, i will stay here for Google related questions".
Besides of that, i see a lot of corners where you could start improving. If you can share your current Unique clients and Pageimpressions with me (on PM) i could mabye give you more tricks as it gives me better feeling about they chances.
Hope this tipps helps and do not bother you.