Nikolas

That's true. Forums are not money makers. Adsense is a good option, but as the people before me allready said, you can't expect much from your traffic. Try the above link for some better results :) [url]http://adsense.blogspot.com/2005/10/six-adsense-optimization-tips-for.html?sourceid=ASO&subid=us_en-link-opttips&medium=link[/url]

Very good thread :) I read here that SEO experts say that pagerank is not used by Google anymore. If that's true then why they keep wasting their multimillion dollar resources to keep it alive? That does not sounds good to me.

The only thing I found working is changing the post variables in the register process. Spammers use bots, that know your forum software. So for instance if you are using the X software they know that they must post to the index.php?action=register page with variables like username, password, passwordAgain, etc. …

That's the golden rule, never give up :) It takes hard work to take off, but after that is really nice to see the results :)

I will agree with pulse. Pagerank is about links, don't confuse this with the SERPs. But I heared that in the latest pagerank update, there were some other factors added for the calculation, like frequency of updates. That make sense because there are many sites with pagerank 3 or higher …

Relevant forums are a great option to get some good links and promote your site. As you are selling products, you may also try to use ebay for more sales.

That's a very general question, and that really depends on you. I have a forum with about 300 members, and the forum hasn't yet come to a state that can grow alone. But for instance I meat today a guy that made a forum with 250 members in 12 hours!

Yeah I almost forgot of those. I was getting good traffic from them back in the 90's, but for now I don't think that they can work. Try other free traffic based promotions such us toplists.

I use SMF. It is very easy to mod (if you know some php ofcourse) In the past I have used phpBB too, but it is too unsecure and produces big overhead to the server.

[quote]Has anyone ever tried linkbaiting?[/quote] That's an uknown word for me. Can you please explain? About the links, the key in my opinion is the content. No matter how many link partners you have or whatever else you have done to get linked by other sites, the real boost is …

I agree. After all if a one line reply is a spam message you can allways delete the post.

I think the worst thing that can you do in a webmaster forum is to post a 'success story' of yours. Before some days a kid had started a topic on another webmaster forum, of how he made 700$ in the first month of his first web site. The idea …

I believe that if you don't enjoy your community like a regular member, then you are not in the right way to make your forum a success.

I will advice to submit your site to as many directories as you can. It helps with the rankings, even if you don't have any SEO knowledge.

Maybe the two forums run on different versions? If that is the case, put the version of phpBB that you have to your enstablished forum, and then upgade the new one.

Article bots? Propably you show that to my forum right? I have this option to my forum (some bots posting news to the site), but to pretend the spam feeling for my members, I have deactivated those posts in the 'Show unread posts' list. I think it is a nice …

After an extended search in the forum, I haven't find anything good about this topic, so I thought to start one. Well everybody knows that a contest can bring lots of traffic and conversions to a web site, especially for forums. The thing that I would like to discuss, is …

Yes you can, but as both of the server work in the port 80, you should have alive one at a time.

First of all 2000 visitors per month is fine for a new site, especially in your market where there are thousands of sites. If your site's pages are allready optimized for the basics (h1, h2, strong, etc) you could try to buy some high pagerank, but relative to your subject …

I would like to comment some of the opinions that you gave here. First I think that deactivating signatures or any solution like this can cause only problems. The objective is not to get rid of 1 post members, but to make those members feel good enough to continue posting. …

A sticky post could help a little, but the fact is that the most of these people are just spammers, so the only solution is to delete their posts.