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How I increased my traffic
Just a side note before we get started - The videos that is article mentions were used to promote my main forum. Even though I own a couple of forums, I also have a few wordpress powered sites. These videos were made for a forum, but I reuse them on my other sites as well. Then the wordpress sites act as portals to the forum. It gets a little complicated, but its actually easy once you get the idea of how things work.
Over the next few days, or maybe even a week or two I will be posting articles on how to break into the video market.
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My first forum was online for about a year (early 2006 - early 2007), and only had about 400 - 500 members. I was really disappointed in the traffic, and knew it was time for a change.
In March of 2007 I took the old site down, and out up a simple Vbulletin page. Its got a few add-ons installed, no big deal. In April I opened with a brand new empty site. One important add-on I installed allows embedded videos in the threads from youtube, google video, yahoo video and myspace.
Now let us begin on how I increased my traffic:
My site is an outdoors, camping, hiking, gardening and hunting type of site. I started making my own videos and uploaded them to youtube, google video, daily motion, myspace, and yahoo video. Everyone of the videos is watermarked with my website name and most of them have the copy write logo after the website name. I make my own videos, water mark them, upload them to youtube and embed them into the threads of the forum.
My youtube videos have been viewed over 2,500,000 times, with an average daily viewing of 12,000 - 15,000.
Every week I get members that come to the website and say "I saw a video on youtube and decided to check this website out." On a few occasions, a member has asked a certain question. I made the video just for that person - example: At the start of the video I said "insert name here from certain country ask....." then went into an answer that members question. This brought the "forum" experience to a new level that most people have never seen before. I got several replies back - "wow, thank you for the video."
The draw back - not everyone agrees with my videos. I have had to block a lot of people because of the comments they were posting on my videos in youtube. I have been called names ranging from the polite to those are fighting words.
What is happening now - some of my members have followed my example and started making their own video, posting them on youtube and embedding them in their threads. some of my members have gone as far as posting their own video blogs. One of my members planted a backyard garden and made 3 video segments about his garden. Then he planted a fruit tree, and vidoed that.
The 2 most important things I did to increase the traffic to my site:
1. Install a mod that allows streaming video from youtube inside the threads.
2. Made my own videos, watermarked them and uploaded them to different video hosting sites.
The videos have gotten so popular, I have added a " Videos" section in my forum. This also gives members a place to show off their videos with losing them in the mix.
If you have a nitch on your site, and its something that is exist in real life. Get a youtube account, make your own videos, watermark them and get you some traffic.
Some of my videos are just down right terrible, some of them I look back and ask, how could I make that much less put it on the web? But some people still love them. Its almost as if - regardless how bad I think it is, someone out there is going to like it.
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But thanksfor sharing on how you increased your traffic to your site
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