Did I choose the wrong niche?

Hi,

I have owned and operated the website optrading.com for nearly 6 years. On my site, never have I requested payment for any information since I follow a general philosophy that great information can be free (after all, if information about investing truly had value - the direct sale of it should be meager compared to its application).

This is why investopedia is free. But, I am in no way a compendium of investing information. Rather, I simply want to foster the growth of information for both myself and everyone that visits my site.

Unfortunetly, the truth is grim. In my niche, people are so set on the fad that if they pay more and more money they will get closer and closer to the golden secret about investing. I find that nobody pays attention to my websites because I DON'T charge anything.

For years, I have owned optrading.com only to find people register and not even verify their e-mail address.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe I am just a terrible website owner. But, when people ask questions, I answer them - is that so bad?

I have tried everything, SEO optimization, seeding, bots, feeds, syndication. Something to build content, to build popularity. Nothing ever works. It seems to me as though the financial niche has absolutely no interest in a free forum except for a couple websites - huge ones that likely have spent big money to develop.

The entire time I have run optrading.com, I am the only person that has ever answered a question, or posted to a new thread for that matter. The only time one poster has ever posted on another thread - it was an advertisement that I subsequently deleted.

At this point, optrading.com is mangled beyond recognition as a forum from both designer handbag posters and my own attempts at building content.

Could the financial world be too much for a forum? Or am I just doing something wrong? Will anyone post to this thread?

It's certainly possible that your demographic is one that is difficult to get active.

Have you considered any other strategies for pulling people in and getting them involved?

Would you consider creating members only content, provided at a subscription rate?

Your investing topic may be to broad. The narrower your subject matter, the easier to obtain users. For example: My tampa site about cars gets a lot more users per day then my tampa site about everything else.

Also, I am on quite a few forex and stock forums that a very narrow, and pretty active. Narrow your subject matter.