Bad advertising, bad genre, or bad luck?

[seedian]

Technically my site has been around for a little more than a year. But it was only open for 3 months, but in those 3 months I got 12 active members, some of which had a couple characters. All my photo's were hosted by photobucket though, so when they got rid of free 3rd party hosting then my site got turned into a mess. I shut it down from march 2017 until I worked up the nerve to transfer one at a time, painfully, all my hundreds of images to another hosting site. I have had my site back up and running since april 2018. Been open same amount of time, 3 months but no luck really. I advertise on a couple proboards site one day, jcink another, and so on so that I am not flooding any one source. I also use social media, reddit and tumblr mostly but throw out stuff on twitter and facebook sometimes. I feel like maybe its just a catch 22 thing where no one wants to join a site without members but you can't have a site with members unless people join. Twice in this last month and once the month prior I had people come on and comment like they were going to join but saw it didn't really have many member. New site honestly so that seemed kind of obvious but that aside it got me thinking, if these people had just joined and started going the site would probably be where they wanted it to be when they looked on it and decided to move on. It is one thing to check out a site and feel like it isn't a good fit and move on but to check it out, like it, consider joining, but decide not to because it doesn't have 100 members....

Any advice? From the hits and comments I got, people are interested in the site, so it isn't so much that I don't have a good story or appealing looking site. But the problem seems to be getting people to pull the trigger, how do I get members if I require members for that to happen? Has my mythical fantasy genre died out that much? I will rp with 5 people just fine all day and if I don't get anyone new and people are showing up and leaving not interested then thats fine, ill rp with the 5 people I have and be happy but when people stop by the site and make an account to pm me or just drop a comment in the cbox to tell me how interested they were if only I had more members or things were more active I can't help but feel like they are the reason for that and how they have the power to change that. What can I do? Anyone come across this phenomenon before? I have had sites that people just weren't interested in and situations where I was lucky if people stopped in to advertise their own sites but never anything like this. Advice?

[Kami]

Honestly, it's probably a combination of all three.

1. Interest in forums overall is not as high as it used to be. Interest in RP forums specifically have also hit a pretty significant decline [x] [x] [x] [x]. This is just circumstance as different social media platforms grow and evolve; with the advent of more instant-feedback platforms like tumblr, facebook, and twitter, forum use has declined pretty rapidly.

2. Original RPs -- as in, not fandom based / based on pre-existing media -- have always been less popular than fandom oriented RPs because of the sheer amount of information they generally require each player to absorb. RPs based on something that already have an established fan based, like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, tend to be more popular since there's less overall work that a potential player needs to do since they were already interested in to begin with.

3. Three months is genuinely not a lot of time to allow advertising to work. Even with the decline on forum usage, there are still hundreds of thousands of mythical fantasy RP forums; simply searching for mythical fantasy forum rp yields 993,000 results. mythical fantasy rp yields 10,600,000 results. You gave three months for your forum to compete with literally 10+ years establishment and hundreds of thousands if not millions of other results. The average potential user is not going to sift through hundreds of thousands of results to find your forum, and three months of half-hearted advertising (not meant in an insulting way, but to contrast between aggressive advertising campaigns that involve either a lot of time or a lot of money) will not allow enough time for search bots to gather results for your search terms. You should really look into SEO, and this help article is a good start: Understanding SEO.

As far as advice, there's not going to be a magical solution that's going to fix your problem. It is a catch-22 situation because people don't want to invest a lot of time on an RP -- any RP, especially an original RP -- that will not have a high return on their investment (this is part of why people tend to gravitate toward fandom RP, since there are always plenty of people fans from outside the forum circuit that could be recruited into participating into a forum rather than relying people who are already interested in forum RP).

The best solution is the one people hate to hear: time and effort. It took YEARS for my own forum to be on the first page of results for our search term despite our URL and site name actually being that search term, and despite our forum existing from almost the exact time the TV series we're based on was first aired. We had everything going for us: the height of forum popularity, the height of popularity for our topic, the perfect URL / forum name, and a low saturation of competition, and it still took a couple of years to have front page results.

Keep trying. Keep advertising. Be more aggressive with advertising.

Make sure your content is easily digestible. I know it's such a huge temptation when creating an original fantasy to pump people full of information, but people don't want to spend hours reading walls of text. Give them short bursts of information and be flexible enough to give your players the freedom to shape the RP. I know you have an idea of how the world / RP works but people join original RPs are attracted by potential to shape an entire world.

I wish you the best of luck. Creating any forum, but especially original RPs, is difficult and time consuming. I hope the above insight helps.

[seedian]

I do appreciate the insight. Although as I explained, I have made it a point to advertise across multiple platforms, in terms of being more aggressive I have kind of pulled back. It is mostly out of fear since most places only allow one advertisement, that I might over saturate too quickly sources where I could post and lose people that I might of caught the attention of later. But I will pick up my advertising efforts and see how things go. I will have to look into SEO more and perhaps see if I cannot improve things on that front too. I can admit I do have allot of information that I could probably mitigate or condense because as you pointed out I want people to have as much information as possible as not to make mistakes based on assumptions but I gave little thought as to the other end of that. Thank you for your thoughts Kami, this helps greatly.

[Kami]

Jul 14, 2018 12:04:25 GMT -8 seedian said:

I have made it a point to advertise across multiple platforms, in terms of being more aggressive I have kind of pulled back.

Advertising on multiple platforms isn't what I mean by being aggressive in advertising (will explain in just a sec).

It is mostly out of fear since most places only allow one advertisement, that I might over saturate too quickly sources where I could post and lose people that I might of caught the attention of later.

I am not suggesting that you violate the rules of your places of advertisement, but rather to be more aggressive in advertising tactics.

What I'm suggesting is aggressive advertising like: a very active social media presence, with a minimum of one post per day across tumblr, twitter, facebook, instagram in addition to a minimum of 10 different forums per day in addition to affiliation links on all of those forums in addition to paid advertising campaigns in addition to participating in forum resource sites like RPG-Directory in addition to being active on other sites and platforms with a visible and accessible link to your forum in addition to targeted SEO content.

Now, I'm not saying you have to do ALL of these, but understand that when you're fighting a million + search results and decades of established history that three months of advertising on a few forums and some social media posts daily is not going to cut it.

But I will pick up my advertising efforts and see how things go. I will have to look into SEO more and perhaps see if I cannot improve things on that front too.

The quick of the SEO is that you need to naturally generate content that will fall in line with your search terms. So if you want to appear in search terms for 'mythical fantasy rp' you'll need to make sure those words, in that order, appear naturally on your forum -- introductory posts like "Welcome to Super Fantasy Land, A Mythical Fantasy RP" helps the indexing bots pick that up. The more time relevant terms like "fantasy RP" and "original fantasy rp" etc etc in a NATURAL (ie: non-spammy) way appear on your forum, the more the indexing bot will associate that as keywords and phrases for your forum.

I can admit I do have allot of information that I could probably mitigate or condense because as you pointed out I want people to have as much information as possible as not to make mistakes based on assumptions but I gave little thought as to the other end of that.

Yeah, this is the mistake most people make -- I still make it to varying degrees myself, despite thirteen years of doing this and other related work. You have to think about it from the user perspective, the user experience.

Put yourself in a prospective member's shoes: the forum needs to be appealing visually (or at least not an eyesore), the content needs to be interesting as well as easy to understand, read AND remember, and the plot needs to invite member participation. Adjust your content to be concise, clear, and compelling, including naturally occurring key words you want to contribute to your search engine rankings.

Hope that helps further (:

[wildmaven]

I just checked your site and it's in maintenance mode. Do you do that often? If so, how are people going to be able to participate. Just putting your questions here in this board generated interest in me to check it out, yet I can't even see it because it's in maintenance mode. A lot of people have very limited time to log in and if they frequently encounter maintenance mode, they're just going to move on to a forum that's always open. The only time you really really need to put it in that mode is if you're doing a major overhaul, and then it's even questionable since you can make a proboards test site to make sure everything works before putting it onto your main site anyway.

In addition, I just looked at your post you put in the Get Opinions board:

Relatively new but not that new. Still a work in progress but for all intensive purposes, it is complete and open. Advice, criticism, tips, or helpful information would be greatly valued. Whether it is the content itself, plugins, skin, theme, or anything you feel I could benefit from hearing about then please don't hesitate to let me know. I just want to create the best site I can and am in it for the long haul. I have my vision and the foundation, I need to build, please lend me the blocks to do so with your opinions, thank you very much.

It's "intents and purposes" not "intensive purposes" which can make people wonder about the writing on your site.

I then looked at your ad in the Advertising board:

About The Site
This is an original rpg not based cannon wise on but strongly influenced by Rick Riordans Percy Jackson & the Olympians Series, The Heroes of Olympus Series, The Kane Chronicles Series, and Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard Series. Cassandra Clare & Joshua Lewis The Mortal Instruments Series as well. TV shows like Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries/Originals, Charmed, and True Blood have inspired elements found on the site. And ideas from games like Diablo & Witcher helped too. So if you like any of these things, you might just like the site and the direction I plan to take with it, plot wise. Be the first to join and head what ever faction that interests you.


Plot
It is 2018 and the world is as we all know it. Humanity prospers with their technology and faith taking many forms. Monsters and magical creatures are hidden or take refuge in their own worlds and the gods have created an elaborate naturally occurring illusion hiding most supernatural occurrences from mortals which some refer to as the divine veil, mirage, or mist. Though some more gifted or attuned can see through it and those of divine origin or blessed are not effected. The different pantheons and factions generally stay out of each others way living where their power is the greatest and serving their followers only when it pleases them to. The world generally is left in the hands of their children; demi-gods. It is on them to protect humanity from the evils that plague them and while most affairs of the gods are left unchecked because of godly squabbles and rivalries, often demi-gods and magical beings alike are left responsible with dealing with these matters as well.

PART 1:

Currently a shadowy figure unseen by any seer, oracle, psychic, or divination of sight whether godly or otherwise is inciting chaos across many worlds, planes, and countries. Whether anyone takes notice before real damage is done remains to be seen. This figure and its agents have invoked unrest among the pantheons stirring up infighting and distracting them from noticing apocalyptic threats. As the pantheons fight among themselves things such as the titans cage begins shaking loose in Tartarus, the chaos growing in the world fuels Apophis's power to the verge of breaking free from his sealment in Duat, and Ragnarök unbeknownst to Asgard approaches prematurely. The balance of Hinduism takes a terrible turn as Vishnu disappears preventing harmony within the universe invoking Shiva to plan their universes destruction early so Brahma can renew things once more. More and more demons seem to be breaking free from Hell and monsters become more and more daring as well attacking frequent and boldly. Will the world survive another titanomachy if it cannot be stopped? Will chaos be unleashed through Apophis? Will Ragnarök be prevented?Will balance be restored to the Daeva pantheon before drastic steps are taken? Does the demonic incursion mean the gates of Hell to Earth are about to be thrown open? In the end it appears it is up to clearer minds no matter how unprepared to find this out, but who will they be?

Chaos will spread in a world of monsters, immortals, and gods. There is chaos on all fronts as the balance the godly pantheons have kept collapses. This sinister shadow even the gods cannot identify is letting loose the greatest evils the world has seen. It is up to the children and chosen heroes of these gods to help stop this evil and protect the mortal realms from annihilation. The titans stir ever ready to reclaim the world for themselves and punish their children and their followers, horrible monsters of legends like harpies and cyclops have began the assault already on heroes and the innocent around the world, hunting any threat that might stop them. Loki convinced by this unknown figure was enticed with the aid of a handful of other Norse gods and have brought Asgard on the brink of civil war inciting conflict between the Aesir and Vanir once more with peace barely holding on. With this distraction an army of Jotunn marched into Midgard to enslave humanity to their will. Immortal giants of all kinds with great magic and strength invade secretly ready to take the world in one quick move. Set the Egyptian god of deserts, storms, strength, chaos, and evil has vowed to dethrone the current Egyptian God head Horus and as their forces clash and sides are taken, Apophis prison weakens. All because whispers in Sets ear of how unworthy Horus was of replacing Osiris when Set killed him in his first attempt at a coup and all by the same mysterious figure.

Whether you are a Demi-God, Legacy of the Gods, Descended Pharoah, Nephilim, Cambion or child of magic, courage, and valor, heroes will be needed, heroes will fall, but heroes must succeed!

*2018 Update! Last year about a year ago photobucket changed their 3rd party hosting policy into a subscription based one so all the images on the site had to be one by one copied and moved unless I wanted to pay the $400 for 3rd party hosting. After a year of putting it off I finally did meticulously move every single image from buttons to layout images, we are back with sort of a soft reset of the site.*

1. It's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long!! An ad should instantly grab your attention.

2. In the first sentence, you spelled canon as cannon. A cannon is a weapon that shoots metal balls. Again, something that will make people wonder about the literacy of a site.

3. Don't tell people to be the first member. No one wants to check out a site that's not active.

4. Get rid of the 2018 update. It's already August and the photobucket thing is old, old news. No one really cares that you moved all your images. It doesn't need to be in the ad.

5. The part I put in bold needs to be at the very top of your ad. It promotes anticipation and excitement. Even if they don't read anything else in your ad, this one sentence makes me want to check it out.

6. Get rid of the plot in your ad. People can read that on your site.

[Lady Malaise]

Lots of helpful info in here. Very interesting read. Thanks.

[Phear]

Jul 14, 2018 13:41:34 GMT -8 Kami said:

Jul 14, 2018 12:04:25 GMT -8 seedian said:

I have made it a point to advertise across multiple platforms, in terms of being more aggressive I have kind of pulled back.

Advertising on multiple platforms isn't what I mean by being aggressive in advertising (will explain in just a sec).

It is mostly out of fear since most places only allow one advertisement, that I might over saturate too quickly sources where I could post and lose people that I might of caught the attention of later.

I am not suggesting that you violate the rules of your places of advertisement, but rather to be more aggressive in advertising tactics.

What I'm suggesting is aggressive advertising like: a very active social media presence, with a minimum of one post per day across tumblr, twitter, facebook, instagram in addition to a minimum of 10 different forums per day in addition to affiliation links on all of those forums in addition to paid advertising campaigns in addition to participating in forum resource sites like RPG-Directory in addition to being active on other sites and platforms with a visible and accessible link to your forum in addition to targeted SEO content.

Now, I'm not saying you have to do ALL of these, but understand that when you're fighting a million + search results and decades of established history that three months of advertising on a few forums and some social media posts daily is not going to cut it.

But I will pick up my advertising efforts and see how things go. I will have to look into SEO more and perhaps see if I cannot improve things on that front too.

The quick of the SEO is that you need to naturally generate content that will fall in line with your search terms. So if you want to appear in search terms for 'mythical fantasy rp' you'll need to make sure those words, in that order, appear naturally on your forum -- introductory posts like "Welcome to Super Fantasy Land, A Mythical Fantasy RP" helps the indexing bots pick that up. The more time relevant terms like "fantasy RP" and "original fantasy rp" etc etc in a NATURAL (ie: non-spammy) way appear on your forum, the more the indexing bot will associate that as keywords and phrases for your forum.

I can admit I do have allot of information that I could probably mitigate or condense because as you pointed out I want people to have as much information as possible as not to make mistakes based on assumptions but I gave little thought as to the other end of that.

Yeah, this is the mistake most people make -- I still make it to varying degrees myself, despite thirteen years of doing this and other related work. You have to think about it from the user perspective, the user experience.

Put yourself in a prospective member's shoes: the forum needs to be appealing visually (or at least not an eyesore), the content needs to be interesting as well as easy to understand, read AND remember, and the plot needs to invite member participation. Adjust your content to be concise, clear, and compelling, including naturally occurring key words you want to contribute to your search engine rankings.

Hope that helps further (:

This is actually an absurdly helpful amount of information. I've been grappling with finding more active members on a niche fan-forum (Godzilla Fan Community), and been using other Godzilla forums, on top of Reddit, and such to try to get them. I've had a few bites, with one particularly fantastic member joining the fray, but not too much luck. It hadn't even crossed my mind to really go all-in on social media, and I wasn't even aware of the Search Engine Optimization on ProBoards.

Thanks for all this!

[seedian]

Aug 7, 2018 14:05:28 GMT -8 wildmaven said:

I just checked your site and it's in maintenance mode. Do you do that often? If so, how are people going to be able to participate. Just putting your questions here in this board generated interest in me to check it out, yet I can't even see it because it's in maintenance mode. A lot of people have very limited time to log in and if they frequently encounter maintenance mode, they're just going to move on to a forum that's always open. The only time you really really need to put it in that mode is if you're doing a major overhaul, and then it's even questionable since you can make a proboards test site to make sure everything works before putting it onto your main site anyway.

In addition, I just looked at your post you put in the Get Opinions board:

Relatively new but not that new. Still a work in progress but for all intensive purposes, it is complete and open. Advice, criticism, tips, or helpful information would be greatly valued. Whether it is the content itself, plugins, skin, theme, or anything you feel I could benefit from hearing about then please don't hesitate to let me know. I just want to create the best site I can and am in it for the long haul. I have my vision and the foundation, I need to build, please lend me the blocks to do so with your opinions, thank you very much.

It's "intents and purposes" not "intensive purposes" which can make people wonder about the writing on your site.

I then looked at your ad in the Advertising board:

About The Site
This is an original rpg not based cannon wise on but strongly influenced by Rick Riordans Percy Jackson & the Olympians Series, The Heroes of Olympus Series, The Kane Chronicles Series, and Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard Series. Cassandra Clare & Joshua Lewis The Mortal Instruments Series as well. TV shows like Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries/Originals, Charmed, and True Blood have inspired elements found on the site. And ideas from games like Diablo & Witcher helped too. So if you like any of these things, you might just like the site and the direction I plan to take with it, plot wise. Be the first to join and head what ever faction that interests you.


Plot
It is 2018 and the world is as we all know it. Humanity prospers with their technology and faith taking many forms. Monsters and magical creatures are hidden or take refuge in their own worlds and the gods have created an elaborate naturally occurring illusion hiding most supernatural occurrences from mortals which some refer to as the divine veil, mirage, or mist. Though some more gifted or attuned can see through it and those of divine origin or blessed are not effected. The different pantheons and factions generally stay out of each others way living where their power is the greatest and serving their followers only when it pleases them to. The world generally is left in the hands of their children; demi-gods. It is on them to protect humanity from the evils that plague them and while most affairs of the gods are left unchecked because of godly squabbles and rivalries, often demi-gods and magical beings alike are left responsible with dealing with these matters as well.

PART 1:

Currently a shadowy figure unseen by any seer, oracle, psychic, or divination of sight whether godly or otherwise is inciting chaos across many worlds, planes, and countries. Whether anyone takes notice before real damage is done remains to be seen. This figure and its agents have invoked unrest among the pantheons stirring up infighting and distracting them from noticing apocalyptic threats. As the pantheons fight among themselves things such as the titans cage begins shaking loose in Tartarus, the chaos growing in the world fuels Apophis's power to the verge of breaking free from his sealment in Duat, and Ragnarök unbeknownst to Asgard approaches prematurely. The balance of Hinduism takes a terrible turn as Vishnu disappears preventing harmony within the universe invoking Shiva to plan their universes destruction early so Brahma can renew things once more. More and more demons seem to be breaking free from Hell and monsters become more and more daring as well attacking frequent and boldly. Will the world survive another titanomachy if it cannot be stopped? Will chaos be unleashed through Apophis? Will Ragnarök be prevented?Will balance be restored to the Daeva pantheon before drastic steps are taken? Does the demonic incursion mean the gates of Hell to Earth are about to be thrown open? In the end it appears it is up to clearer minds no matter how unprepared to find this out, but who will they be?

Chaos will spread in a world of monsters, immortals, and gods. There is chaos on all fronts as the balance the godly pantheons have kept collapses. This sinister shadow even the gods cannot identify is letting loose the greatest evils the world has seen. It is up to the children and chosen heroes of these gods to help stop this evil and protect the mortal realms from annihilation. The titans stir ever ready to reclaim the world for themselves and punish their children and their followers, horrible monsters of legends like harpies and cyclops have began the assault already on heroes and the innocent around the world, hunting any threat that might stop them. Loki convinced by this unknown figure was enticed with the aid of a handful of other Norse gods and have brought Asgard on the brink of civil war inciting conflict between the Aesir and Vanir once more with peace barely holding on. With this distraction an army of Jotunn marched into Midgard to enslave humanity to their will. Immortal giants of all kinds with great magic and strength invade secretly ready to take the world in one quick move. Set the Egyptian god of deserts, storms, strength, chaos, and evil has vowed to dethrone the current Egyptian God head Horus and as their forces clash and sides are taken, Apophis prison weakens. All because whispers in Sets ear of how unworthy Horus was of replacing Osiris when Set killed him in his first attempt at a coup and all by the same mysterious figure.

Whether you are a Demi-God, Legacy of the Gods, Descended Pharoah, Nephilim, Cambion or child of magic, courage, and valor, heroes will be needed, heroes will fall, but heroes must succeed!

*2018 Update! Last year about a year ago photobucket changed their 3rd party hosting policy into a subscription based one so all the images on the site had to be one by one copied and moved unless I wanted to pay the $400 for 3rd party hosting. After a year of putting it off I finally did meticulously move every single image from buttons to layout images, we are back with sort of a soft reset of the site.*

1. It's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long!! An ad should instantly grab your attention.

2. In the first sentence, you spelled canon as cannon. A cannon is a weapon that shoots metal balls. Again, something that will make people wonder about the literacy of a site.

3. Don't tell people to be the first member. No one wants to check out a site that's not active.

4. Get rid of the 2018 update. It's already August and the photobucket thing is old, old news. No one really cares that you moved all your images. It doesn't need to be in the ad.

5. The part I put in bold needs to be at the very top of your ad. It promotes anticipation and excitement. Even if they don't read anything else in your ad, this one sentence makes me want to check it out.

6. Get rid of the plot in your ad. People can read that on your site.

I appreciate your insight. No I do not got into maintenance mode often. This is the second time I have put the site into maintenance mode with the last being over a year ago and I did that because I was debating on deleting it outright. I understood the consequences of putting it in maintenance mode this last month but I needed to be gone for a month without access to it. My thought process was simply that having the site in maintenance mode might drive people away, sure,  but the next time they see the ad for it they might not even remember they had been to it as it was just something they passed over within a moment and the maintenance mode is generic for any site and easily forgotten. However, if they stumbled upon a site they decided to join and couldn't get in contact with an admin(me) for a question or thought that prevents their progression, or more on that they have their character up but can't do anything even with other members there because I am gone a month, they are probably not only going to leave but remember the site negatively and not give it the time of day the next time they come across it. I understand where you are coming from but I put myself in the perspective of someone visiting and just picked the lesser of two bad potential outcomes.

I changed the ad to be brief and I think hit all your points on the original, fixed the typo, and got rid of the whole "be the first" portion of the new condensed ad that still retains that part. I am still working on lessening the more detailed information about the site that can be found in the guide section of my site which are also quick links at the top which Kami suggested I also condense. I am not good at knowing what is too much information and what isn't enough. I don't want to limit creativity by any means but I do have a general idea on what I want allowed and not allowed and I am working to find a good medium. I redid my species description, it was huge before and will be working more on doing the same for the other guiding information threads to perhaps make jumping in less overwhelming or restricting. 

[GingaLord]

Very useful information here! I was browsing the board for some helpful threads and this thread has tons of helpful information!

[Eloell]

I've found that having RP friends who are going to join you and help be a part of that core group to is really helpful. It gets you past that "catch 22" of people wanting an active site and not being willing to invest and be a part of the crowd that makes it active. I never open a new site without at least 4 RP friends (relationships built over time and across sites) who are willing to at least test the site for me.

Love the other information provided by folks!