So I am in the process of buying an IPB license and movign from XF to IPB and I have been doing a lot of thinking of rebranding my forum. My forum is a fansite dedicated to different book series and what not but the actual name of the site correlates to one of the books(the most popular book on the forums). Unfortunately, we have pretty stiff competition with another more esablished site. There site has been around for going on 3 years and though their site's current activeness is basically the same as mine, if people do search engine searches they will always find the competitors site first instead of mine. So I was thinking of trying to promote more as a Teen site with the books being apart or a section of the forum instead of a book forum exclusively. THe way I see it... We may be able to reach a broader audience. I also see it this way We have 42,000 posts Out of those 42,000 post 4,000 posts are in the actual book area 20,000 posts are in the forum games area 8,000 for Roleplaying and the other 10,000 are in the general discussion forums. Mind you this is supposed to be a book forum. I brought this up with my admin team because even though this is my site, I want to get feedback. They agreed we should probaby change the name but they said that i would be getting away from the purpose of the site. But looking above....the book forums barely make up 1/10 of the actual posts. So is it a bad move rebranding the site?
i took the forum offline for a few days(and doing a domain change and a software conversion) so i will link it when everything is done so you can see the finish product. (I have a temporary site set up so my members can continue chatting with each oher while the forum is back up) do you think it is a bad idea to rebrand though based on the stats above?
Well, what do you want to do? I mean, what do you want your forum to do? Do you want more focus on General Discussion? Do you want more focus on forum games? What do you want to do? Because while the admin team is part of the success of the forum, there needs to be a burning passion from the owner about the subject.
I just want a community where the actual topic and theme of the forum is the dominant aspect vs being a small part like it is now.
Then simply tell your community members that. Simple as it sounds, it may be the best way to approach it. Tell them you don't mind off-topic chatter, in fact you embrace it as it helps people get to know each other, but you want to be know as the best site for your topic so you'd like people to post more about it and make it a better resource than it is now. Cheers, Shaun
But your members don't want to discuss books anymore. Change in the community means their tastes changed. This is a perfect time for you to think about which of the subjects you want to focus on. I'm talking about you, the owner, the lead admin.. It seems that the book niche in your forum is dying off. So, if you were considering moving into the forum games niche [for example], now is the time to do it. Let me put it this way. I own CODForums, it's a Call of Duty forum, right? In the next two years, Call of Duty will become another niche, instead of the market leader that it is now. I will merge this forum into a gaming forum in the near future [that is, if the members don't want to talk about Call of Duty anymore or there isn't much market left in Call of Duty anymore], because people's tastes changes with the times. Another example I have is a Marvel Vs Capcom 3 Forum. It's dying a slow death. Why? Because the market for MVC3 is as dead as it is as a niche. Not even UMVC3, the update to the original MVC3 helped our forum's prosperity.
