I received an email from Ramon asking for some suggestions on how to improve his webmaster forum 9mb.com. So I decided that it’d be a great opportunity for readers to improve their forums if I started offering free forum reviews on occasion to help out everyone. So I gladly accepted his offer and took a little time to review the forum and throw out a couple ideas on how to improve things. Here is the email he sent me:

Hey Chris,

Can you maybe give me some advice how to get my forum to the next level ?

I see you have a lot of experience in the forum scene! and I wonder if you can
give me tips or suggestions for my forum at www.9mb.com

Thanks in advance,

Ramon

My response was:

Hey Ramon,

Yah I’ll give you a few tips:

First off, I think that you should have actual articles on the front page of your website otherwise there isn’t really a huge reason why you should use vBadvanced on the front page if the only thing you’re going to display is recent posts. (Although, I do have a similiar setup on my WoW forum but I haven’t been focusing on that forum as much to even care )

Also, one thing that turns off possible registering members is if they see subforums that haven’t been posted in for a while. I see overall many forums are pretty active but you should try writing threads that ask questions that can then encourage readers to post (not unlike what bloggers try to do to get people to comment on their blog).

I think in your header you should remove Google Whores and replace it with webmaster forum as well because that’s what your forum is about. When I hear Google Whores I think of the post John Chow made long ago about how much some people were making on Adsense, not a webmaster forum.

And I didn’t check, but if you run a webmaster forum I think it’s hard to get by without doing some sort of a revenue sharing model otherwise why won’t someone just go over to the forums at digital point where they can make money while they post?

Lastly, I would highly suggest you install the improve registrations plugin found here: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=119572 you’ll get more members to register that way.

Ramon let me know that he currently shares 100% of the forum revenue with members which is certainly a great way to generate activity on a webmaster forum. I wouldn’t recommend this strategy if the forum’s focus was photography for example because the members likely don’t have an adsense account so there is no reason to even talk about adsense revenue on a forum like that. But because he’s doing this on a webmaster forum I think it’s pretty good strategy, just make sure you start selling private ads sometime too.

If you would like your forum reviewed for free send me an email and I may review it in a future post. Simply send me an email via the contact form and if I review your forum you’ll see my response in a future blog post. So don’t ask for a forum review if you don’t want your forum’s URL posted on my blog ;). I may eventually charge for this service, but in the meantime take advantage of getting it for free by contacing me now.

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