MESKOS Forum Development Blog

Bringing Life into a Dead Forum

Maybe when you first started your community, you didn’t realize how much time you needed to create quality content. Perhaps you didn’t spend enough time on your forum to lift it from the ground. Whatever the reason was, your forum is now quiet and a lonely community without much activity.

Don’t despair though, as it’s always possible to kick a dead forum back into life.

Are you prepared and Committed?

Your community went down for a reason. It’s stale and dead but are you prepared to be committed and bring some life back into your dead community? If you are planning to do so, one key factor is the forum owner’s enthusiasm. If you can’t maintain a high enthusiasm for more than a month, it may be challenging to achieve any success.

Think about how your online community got into its current condition, and what will be needed to avoid that happening again. If you are sure you are ready for the challenge, here is what I advise you to do.

Steps to Bringing Life into a Dead Forum

Consider a Redesign.

Redesigning your forum with a fresh appearance will attract your members attention. It shows that you are caring for the community and willing to spend time to revive it. If you have funds, spend a few $xx on a new custom skin or if you are financially limited, you can find many free but quality forum skins on Google.

More and More Fresh Content.

Content makes up your forum. Without content, there won’t be members. Without members there won’t be interaction. And without interaction, there is no community.

Your forum probably died from the lack of content being posted on a regular basis. If someone arrives at your forum and sees no content, they might aswell leave and forget about your community, why? because they can’t find anything interesting.

So don’t let this happen. Start creating content! If it’s needed, dedicate a week to just filling up the forum with quality content (Polls, discussions, debates, surveys etc).

Setting Targets, Achieving Goals.

Set targets for yourself. Write down or save a document which has the number of posts you want to have within a period of time. Decide how many link exchanges you want to make within a week. Set a number of posts you should post in a day.

Remember to set targets for every stage of your forum.

Bulk-Emailing your members.

You would be wasting your time if no one knows about the hard work you put into reviving the forum. Stated in my A Community is like a Beautiful Woman article, “Beauty must be seen to be appreciated”.

How can you contact all your old members and notify them about the fresh changes? Bulk-Email them. All forum softwares will have a feature which sends an email to all members of a board.

Some members will need some convincing for them to return. In your message, really talk up the forum renovation and the quality content. Include links to parts of the community which will convince them.

Don’t stop, Keep going.

You’ve spent days in renovating your forum. You will most likely see a new boost in activity but in most cases they slowly die off again. You must maintain the momentum and never let it stop. Continue to interact with your members, and continue to keep them happy.

Remember to advertise your forum in every way possible and don’t let your enthusiasm drop. Keep a positive attitude towards your community and remain committed.

Now watch your forum rise from the ashes!

Feel free to leave a comment and share your thoughts and views on this entry.