Any success with Forums/ message boards?
I have a message board on my site
http://mylifepoststroke.com/forums/
It has over 130 registered members. The problem is, nobody is posting anything. As soon as each new member joins, I send a welcome email with a link to the introduce yourself page. I'm the only one posting and I see people have looked, but there is no interaction. I'm just wondering if the whole site needs some major changes or is it just the structure of the message board itself?
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Are you running your site on WA? For some reason I thought you could not run a forum from the WA server -- but maybe I misunderstood that (I just read it somewhere on a post I have not gotten that far in the "courses" about wordpress)... Anyway I've looked at your site before -- and commented it was very nice. Do you have a lot of visitors coming? If you have a lot of visitors perhaps some different subject categories might get some participation?
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Politics, Places to Go, Are there any support groups people would want to know about that might be a good category -- or maybe a classification for support groups/news. Coupons/bargains/thrift findings? Maybe break random thoughts out into some sub categories it is pretty broad (do people read past the title to see what is in the 4 sentences?), maybe make news heading more specific (health news?), then the therapy treatments might be redundant tho. Insurance might be a relevant topic. Doctors -- that might stand out and get someone to look. Caregivers might be caregivers/providing services. Then you might have caregivers/seeking services. Best sites on the internet. Best kindle books. Best books to read. Related movies. I think a lot of people want to lurk but do not participate -- you may need to get a friend or two to help you as regular contributors. It is sort of like here on WA there are not that many people who really produce quality content in proportion to the membership -- but many people look (and many play).. Those who are signed up with your forum -- does your software give you the ability to send them a little newsletter -- and perhaps ask them to come back and add some content or suggest for them to comment what they would like to see happen with the structure of the forum. Don't feel too bad about this -- I've had websites before with forums and lots of people would sign up but just a handful would participate. It is a nice feature and gives more content -- but may not exactly take off like a rocket.
Thanks so much, Mike! This is all very helpful. The mingle plugin doesn't allow for me to make a mass emailing like that. It does allow for the poster to be notified when there is activity on their posts or on whatever topic they wish to keep track of. I will look at tinkering with the topics too
They seem to have an associated plug in that pushes to an emailer -- but the emailer (Aweber) would cost to use, so probably not worth all the effort. The plug in is mingle a weber signup -- http://wordpress.org/plugins/mingle-aweber-signup/