Why wont our forum get any members?

[seanm07]

After 4 months our forum has got 0 members exept from the ones that we have actualy told them but they are in our clan, which total 14 and a test user and a news bot, totaling 16.
I know its a clan forum but it's not just clan members it's for just normal posters too because people don't normal post in the aouv section anyway.
But how can we get members? we dont even get any guests exept from spiders and bots.
Our forum looks very profesional and the posts are very tidy.
Heres the link: www.aouv.co.uk/forums or www.aouv.co.uk to get to the main page.
We don't even get spammers please help. :erm:

1- ear to mouth... look like you've done it
2- http://dmoz.org ... submit your site to the proper category
3- google analytics ... you will see if you have real visitors
4- call your site in google from time to time; site:yoursite.com

5- good thing is to have a wordpress as a News Front page, so wordpress will submit each of your News to the regular ping-back systems and your site will be indexed.

[cheat-master30]

Your forum is brand new, less than a month old. And in that time, 20 members is actually okay, especially from just word of mouth.

[RCWF-AoD]

Our site has been online for close to two years now and we only have 213 registered members.

First and most importantly get your forum indexed by google, yahoo, ask, and all of the other search engines. With newer types of indexing, the meta tags don't do nearly as much as they used to. However, make sure you fill your meta keywords entry under vB options in the admincp with really descriptive words about your forum. Also a nice looking descriptive meta description is a good thing (what you'll see if you find the site on the search engines).

One real big help that we've noticed (as we've been getting more and more users from search engines lately), CONTENT. The more information your site has, whether it be forum or page based information, the better chance your site will be found.

I hope this helps you out a little bud. And being online for only a month; that's not bad. It took our site almost a month before it even got indexed on google! AFTER sending them an email about how to get our site indexed properly!

[halliday06]

my forum has been online around 6 weeks now and has over 500 members....

i got it this high by offering an incentive, its a music production forum, i got a software vendor to sponsor a remix competition, i then advertised the competition around the internet.

maybe u can do the same? i dunno about clans, but maybe u could try and get a lan server space company to sponsor a little competition... they may offer some free space or team speaks or whatever u guys get up to????

advertise it around the internet...

keep at it.

[Alfa1]

the header design on the home page is out of place.

[seanm07]

Originally Posted by nexialys

1- ear to mouth... look like you've done it
2- http://dmoz.org ... submit your site to the proper category
3- google analytics ... you will see if you have real visitors
4- call your site in google from time to time; site:yoursite.com

5- good thing is to have a wordpress as a News Front page, so wordpress will submit each of your News to the regular ping-back systems and your site will be indexed.

Thanks i have done step 3 and going to do 5 and as you know i have done step 1 and i have been doing step 4 daily but when i type aouv i get did you mean you...
anyway dmoz is broken when i click the suggest url button like it says in the instructions :/