Roleplay Chat

I gotta say like... Not gonna lie, I think you're being a little too easily frustrated.

When I gave your site a rate a couple of weeks ago, you had just started within the month. It is very, very, very rare for a site -- especially one with an original setting -- to take off within this period of time. Some people get lucky, but it's just that: luck. If you're frustrated now, what's gonna happen in six months? You are building a user base from scratch because of your original setting. Even fandom forums -- forums that already have an existing user base to get members from -- do not have success within the first six months of their creation. Even though it's been several years since I moderated the advert board here, not much has changed -- sites that you see boasting x amount of members tend to have been around for six months or longer.

RP forums as a whole are also not as popular as they were in the early 2000s; while there are still too many around to count, the pool of potential users is even smaller for you because in addition to not having a pre-existing fanbase to draw users from, people in general are seeking RP forums out less than they used to. The success you may have had in 2003 is going to be vastly different from the success you'll have in 2016 and beyond. Case in point:

Google trends for the term "RP forum" spiked around 2007-2008: www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rp%20forum

"Forum RPG" spiked in 2007: www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=forum%20rpg

"Original RP" spiked in 2004: www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=original%20rp


And so on and so forth. In all likelihood you will not see much success within the first year of your forum's life. Some people can get really lucky and hit all the right keywords and create their forum at just the right moment. Most everyone else, however, has to put in a LOT of time and effort to even have a moderate amount of success.

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Also. The fact that you paid real money to promote your forum at this stage is honestly wild to me. I have never, ever, spent a single cent on advertising. I get that you want more success right away but quite frankly this is not the way to get it; I don't know what your advertising budget is, but I do know how facebook advertising works -- the reach you'd get from their cheap advertising plans is honestly not even worth it. You pay per impression so that means the person viewing the ad does not have to even CLICK on your advertisement in order for that to count against your budget. Considering the amount of people who use adblock on facebook because of how invasive their advertisement posts are, the amount of money you'll wind up spending to have a noticeable amount of traffic to your site from facebook is exorbitant for a hobby forum. Paying for exposure on facebook will be more successful for people with huge budgets: companies, mainly. Even celebrity facebook pages do not pay for this type of advertising generally speaking because of how expensive it will get in order to even be remotely effective.

It is far more effective -- both in terms of success, cost, and time -- if you concentrate on spreading your link manually for search bots to index (affiliations, posted advertisements, topsites, in your forum signature while you're active on a forum, social media, etc) and continue generating content that has relevant keywords (example: an 'about' thread that reads something like "Welcome to (site), an original fantasy RP" and similar phrasing explaining your site's content) in order to improve your SEO rankings, you will have far better success than throwing your money at an advertising strategy that will cost you more than the members you'd get.