I posted this elsewhere but wanted to get some feedback from GFYers. Hopefully you guys have some input on this or have run mainstream forums...Personally, I haven't and and have limited knowledge to gauge the success or potential success and my patience is not a virtue
It's been about a month now for a beta we launched, our preliminary market pump was 3 months prior on our current sites and also did a bunch of viral campaigns before hand so had traffic ready to go and built in (the site is a mainstream/satire forum) so it was fairly easy to brand with our current sites. We generated and created an acronym that is fairly well accepted now.
So as it stands in addition to current internal network links, we have pr7+ static links (non-paid for) coming in which are solid sources and giving about 50% of the traffic, the rest is from viral campaigns and SE where our SERPS are hitting 3-5 on average. Adsense approved and 3 other tough approvals came though (because we're pure satire and have offended)...google bot, yahoo, msnbot etc. are hitting it fairly well, Baidu has been spidering also and hitting so the Chinese traffic is converting as planned with current sponsors.
So everything is good, but here is the problem that I see, the threads are getting good views, 300-700 per thread...but registrations are very low, after 1 month around 60 - this I'm thinking is very slow and posting is slow. But the site is converting and making a small profit. We haven't implemented the PPC either (straight revs). So the place looks dead with the exception of a few posters. I want to pretty much revamp it into a static model which I'm more comfortable with....but not knowing the cycle of forum profitability I am hesitant.
So the question...is 1 month premature to make any changes on a forum model?
Forum or traditional static driven content (given this situation)?
Also link-ins and partners would not care either way you take it (same topic and relevancy)