Ways to grow Gearhead Central?

There are a lot of traffic exchange sites (or services) that can help increase SEOs. There are clicker sites too! I guess this is the first step in improving the hits of the site. Then you can pay Facebook like a couple of cents a day, for your Facebook fanpage to appear on the right side of the screen of random people, specially with the same interests as listed on their profiles. In which your fanpage promotes this site.

 

This is just my opinion, but I wouldn't use any of the traffic generating websites. Traffic Swarm is going to cause you a lot of problems. The tactics involved in using link farms and traffic generating websites are frowned upon by search engines (SEs). Those things might have worked for a time around 2006. All they do now is get your website flagged as a bad neighborhood. If the SEs think that you are trying to game their search results, they might ban you. Google is notorious for banning such websites. It is much better to grow the website naturally. If everyone just keeps posting good content, the users will find their way here. Content is king. No matter what SEO businesses say about optimization, the single best thing you can do for your website is to write original content.

 

Okay, please excuse my naivete' , but what benefits come from growing the site? I really don't understand.

 

More members... more members to chat with, says the man with a gazillion replies/comments.
Oh okay, I get it, you've resigned yourself to never really sleep again!

Seriously though, thanks for explaining because I was wondering what the need for 'growth' is. On some sites, I suppose (but I'm not sure), growth means more advertising, but I don't see any ads at all on this forum, so, as I said, I was just wondering.

 

Hmmm, the site needs to pay its own way?? I did not know that either . Oh well, I know now.
Like "they" say, "You learn something new every day."

Just to clarify a bit, I was wondering about what the benefit of growing this site was because I have seen other sites/pages that do not have nearly as much traffic as Gearhead Central has, however those sites/pages have ads floating all over the place (not that I dislike ads, on the contrary, I adore clicking on ads, that's how I got banned from facebook)...

...those sites/pages have ads floating all over the place, so I have always thought that those site/page owners want to grow their sites because that growth will perhaps make them more attractive to more advertisers. More ads, more money in their pocket perhaps? (I have no clue how it all works.)

Since your site has no ads on it, I figured that ad revenue is not the motivation to grow this site, so I was just curious as to why you wanted to grow the site. You have explained it to me: more members to chat with, more knowledge about different things. I get it now !

 

How about writing some how-to articles?

 

Hi James!

I have not been here to much this month because the beginning of the month and January especially, is always a pain in the butt for me and this year was not different...but I will be posting again...but mainly with vids as usual!

 

This forum is amazing, I can see it becoming huge in a couple of years, and by years, it's considered warp speed for a forum. So good luck GHC !

 

Zee is right, fast on a forum is measured in years, not months

The content itself will draw more traffic from search naturally over time but that doesn't mean visitors will convert into members so...

- I like to see contests or promotions that give away things like Gearhead t-shirts instead of money.
- I like to see forums active outside of the forum too, even if just reporting from car shows.
- I like to see member galleries, especially if they are wearing Gearhead T's.
- See if you can find a performance company willing to partner up with you to cross-promote each other.

These work and have been done before, so the question is what can Gearhead Central do that other forums are not?

 

First of all, congratulations on hitting the 1000 posts mark, that's brilliant and its great that the community is growing, slowly but surely!

As for the main question at hand, I agree with quite a few things that have been posted so far and would like to reaffirm them. Facebook and Twitter are great tools to market the forum and get the name "out there". I think the referral system is something you should definitely invest some time in, people with a naturally competitive attitude will want to "grab" whatever prizes you are offering for the highest referrals. If your offering things that are interesting to your fan base then you will again, naturally have most people trying to win. I would recommended initially starting off with a mixture of small cash prizes and most importantly, products that promote your website! This could be anything like a T-shirt with your website on it and your logo, car stickers etc It doesn't have to be expensive products, it just needs to have your logo and website on it.

Lastly, as evilgenius said, you need to sign up on other wheel forums and make sure your signature and avatar have this website written all over it

Concerning the whole referral system, as you mentioned yourself, you will need to put down some rules first before you go ahead with it. You need to put a system in place where you can identify legitimate referrals from fake accounts. Post count or IP tracker of the accounts registered.

 

VIP Package for founding members? Hey, I'm one of those guys, newly named. Too cool.
Ryder13