Help Needed Site not taking off

Hello

Pregnancy & Parenting

Ive had my forum for about 10 months and had forum writers doing posts for me and automated posts via rss feeds, but for some reason i cant get people to sign up nor write posts.

I have changed the domain so it has it own one it use to be part of my main site.

I'm not sure if i have the site set up right with VBSeo but i see a lot of bots on the site so i must be working ok, but i find the site so slow, not the main page but if you go to a post it takes sometime to load. if i can get people to sign up then i mite as well give up and that would be a shame as i have spent so much time on it and money on it, but not sure what elae i can do or if it needs SEO some other way.

Any advice would be great

#1) kill the feeds.

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none of which has anything to do with parenting.

2) you're in a tough niche. Results 1 - 10 of about 663,000 for parenting forum
What do you offer that the other 663,000 sites don't? If you can't answer that, you need to re-think your business model.


Starting a forum from scratch is tough. REAL tough. YOU have to post post post post post and when you think you got enough, post 1000 more times the next week.
GOOD quality posts. not entertainment crap that has nothing to do with your niche at all.

Good points, i will kill the feeds, as for 663,000 sites don't, nothing i guess, its just i run a baby store and blog and both are about parenting and doing well, so i thought i would also run a forum as im in that niche market anyway..

Thanks for your honest reply

In vB ACP, change the setting so that CSS is in a separate file from your HTML code.

In your header, add your site name to the alt attribute for the logo image and link it to the domain root.

I have always found communities grow faster if you remove all the ads at first. If you keep the AdSense just to the archive pages (you don't have any there now...), you might generate enough revenue to pay for hosting costs.

You might try reworking the forum descriptions to include the words "pregnancy" or "parenting" where appropriate. The words hardly appear on the home page.

The link in the footer to the home page can be renamed Pregnancy and Parenting Forum instead of Home Page.

The menu on the left hand side of the page was not easy on the eyes IMO - small white text on a light colored background. I'd make the links red consistent with all the rest of the links on the page and larger/bold font - especially the register link.

HTH!

Keep up the work! It can be done! My GPS site is only a little over a year old, and ranks 2nd for "gps forum" out of 1.9million results (3rd for "gps forums"):

gps forum - Google Search

Try a strategy to help differentiate yourself from the other sites as best as you can:
Strategy for Optimizing Keywords in Your vBulletin Forum Title and Descriptions