How to Increase Forum Traffic

My wife came to me last night with the concern that she'd lost a good bit of traffic on her scrapbooking website ScrapLove. She was particularly worried because she's recently made the move to open an online scrapbooking store and traffic on the site will directly affect her sales. We sat down for half an hour or so and came up with a list of ways to revitalize her traffic.

Start a paid advertising campaign. I'm a big fan of Google Adwords and I know the results it can have if it's managed carefully. This is going to have the largest and most immediate impact on her site and in particular her sales. We'll bid higher on product related keywords to bring visitors to sales landing pages for those products and we'll also put in some lowball bids on broader terms just to get some traffic to her site and new members in the forum. She has time to maintain an active forum and a pretty high long-term user conversion rate, so money spent attracting first-time visitors to the forum will likely be worth it.

She needs to coddle the membership. Since her focus has been on ordering stock, establishing a storefront and setting up an accounting system, she's lost touch with some of her membership base. She hasn't had time to host online bingo, reply to posts or add scrapbook layouts to her gallery. Since this is largely why the membership is there to begin with, it's important for her to reinvest some extra effort into making her site the place to be.

Start a grassroots marketing campaign. Up until now, ScrapLove has grown largely due to organic marketing - word of mouth, free search traffic, etc. The site is full of quality content particularly if you're into scrapbooking, but I feel she's hit the ceiling for growth unless she actively pursues some additional traffic sources. It'll be difficult for her to participate in link exchanges with a storefront (nobody likes competition) so she needs to pound the pavement and put her name out on forum posts, blog responses, and some of the social networking sites.

Look to the existing members for support. ScrapLove has a strong core membership of active moderators and daily posters. They're an active community and are always willing to help each other out. This is a major advantage for her because she can look to them to help not only with coddling the existing members, but also with the grassroots marketing. One of the ideas on the table now is a membership drive with kudos and a dollar store trinket for any member who brings on someone new that posts twenty or so posts. It's a simple idea, but highly effective and at very little cost.