A Recommendation (or 2) to get more Active Members

[David Octavius]

As you guys may or may not know my profession is in Online marketing, I work for an interactive agency. As such I have been exposed and helped clients gain exposure/customers in many different channels. So in the spirit of wanting to see this board grow as fast as possible I want to share a few ways to grow your traffic.

I see you guys use adsense on the site, I assume it is to help defer costs to keep the site up. Have you considered also joining ad networks and devote some banner space (that will be seen by unregistered people only) on a CPM basis and then use any extra funds to advertise on Google/Yahoo on their search (Cost Per Click basis)? Ad networks aggregate impression inventory from many sites at a cost effective CPM for advertisers. The advantage for the advertiser is a time savings of having to contact and negotiate with each individual site and at a lower overall CPM. The advantage for you as a publisher is that you don't have to wait for advertisers, they are rotated in and you get paid on a CPM instead of a per click basis.

Some networks that come to mind are Google Site Target and Specific Media which I can get you contact information on.

The good thing about turning around extra funds for search is that you have great control over costs and access to a lot of traffic, I can even help you create a small keyword list. (Of course there will be no charge)

- Another tactic you can use that is free is regularly del.icio.us and digg posts that you find exceptional with relevant but popular tags

- Create a RSS feed (not sure if this is possible for a forum site) and submit to services like feedburner