Brainstorming Ideas on Increasing Traffic

[Ragriz]

I have been investigating some ways to begin driving traffic to my websites and keeping it there.

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on the following:

1. Video Media (youtube, vimeo, etc. etc.) How effective are videos in regards to driving traffic to a website. Do they contribute to SEO any better than traditional on and off page methods.

2. Forums. I would think that if a good site could bring people in, a forum could provide the incentive to keep returning. Worth the trouble?

I have been focusing on website optimization for the time being, but I was curious to know if the benefits of the above are worth the effort.

 

[djbaxter]

I haven't dabbled in video promotion personally but some people have had good results from it, or so I hear. I think one factor might be if you have an engaging on-screen personality so that people want to see and hear more of you, kind of like Matt Cutts when he was the rockstar of Google.

A forum takes time to build and requires a lot of time and effort. It's not something that goes viral or lands a giant community in its first month or two. You need to build the membership slowly and give them reasons to return. To be blunt, more forums fail than survive. But if yours can survive the first 6 months to a year and reach what I call "critical mass" it can take off in an accelerating curve - if you remain active and your members remain active.

 

[Ragriz]

So both are all about engagement, I figured as much.

Might be worth running a few trials.

 

[minisam]

Personally, I have not tried Youtube marketing because English is not my language so it will be hard doing youtube videos, but from friends l know, it`s really worth the time as there is less competition there.
A forum, you`ll need to spend quite a lot of time there unless you have people helping you run the forum.Whatever you decide,wish you the best but if you have to chose between the two,go with Youtube marketing.

 

[Ragriz]

Personally, I have not tried Youtube marketing because English is not my language so it will be hard doing youtube videos, but from friends l know, it`s really worth the time as there is less competition there.
A forum, you`ll need to spend quite a lot of time there unless you have people helping you run the forum.Whatever you decide,wish you the best but if you have to chose between the two,go with Youtube marketing.

Good points, I am thinking about starting with the video aspect first. Every extra visitor is a good thing plus the additional links couldn't hurt.

Build up a sizeable amount of visitors and then introduce a forum and additional social networking to keep them established.

 

[Bhaskar]

All we know that youtube is second biggest search engine on the planet after google, it generates an estimate 92 billion page view each month which also provides huge traffic to different websites and blogs, and about 35 hours of video are uploaded every minute.

 

[Adrianna Nine]

@Ragriz , if you choose to start your own forum, you'll definitely benefit from having a community to bring with you. It's incredibly hard to bring new users into an empty forum, so you'll have to begin with several key users that will keep the forum active, which will then make the forum look more appealing to visitors.