My website is losing signups and I don't know what to do

Hi Adie,
I've seen in a few posts you are recommending people to wait a little bit more. Why do you say this, are you working on a solution or is google going to offer one?

Thanks for clarifying.

Andrew

Thanks for all the advice, I will try and answer all these.

Bitdot: I have. we run contests regularly, I have added avatar makers, which are very popular, we run point and badge earning contests, events, and introduce new boards, events, or new features weekly--at least.

Still the signups are deteriorating, slowly but surely.

I have a twitter feed with over 1000 followers and post the new additions to the site on it regularly.

We already have a facebook fan page and it has 1000K+ likes.

I reward members for referrals and for advertising our site on a daily basis.

I am spending money on building the new features for the site.

Backlinks: Build them how? Where? I've tried this too, by the way, on social bookmarks, blogs, twitter, facebook, tumblr {we have a tumblr blog too} and I am listed in some directories and I wrote an Ezine article that has our link.

I have already gone through all the data and I do it EVERY day. That's why I am here, because I can't get this to turn around. Our google ranking hasn't changed from panda and penguin and them. It's the same as it always was.

Has this helped? Would it help a roleplaying forum? Have you noticed an increase from this?

I have a Twitter account already and post regularly and follow everyone I can. Should I get two Twitters? I follow gamers, roleplayers, etc. in my niche. My link is in my signature if you want to take a look at the site. DESPERATE here!!!!

It's free to sign up. Always has been always will be. I already have tried specials days where new signups get perks. It hasn't worked.

They navigate onto the main page and then into the various roleplaying and discussion areas. I don't know what to do that would make them go to different boards or how that would increase signups.

It appears to be based on Statcounter. They come in for keywords warrior cats, warrior cats RPG and rarely anything else despite my having a large area that's not Warrior cats based and is enjoyed by most people on the site. I don't get why the site is not gaining rank for anything else in Google. Or if it is why people aren't clicking to it.

I've already varied my marketing efforts, and have involved my members in the help. I have a few hundred members and they've been posting links and ads. Nothing is helping.

Please...please...god...I'm crying my eyes out...

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this could well be the problem. People simply aren't as interested in the topic as they once were.

It sounds like your site is considered an authority by Google for the Warrior Cats niche, but isn't getting much respect for your other topics. I suggest you concentrate you linking on the other topics, realizing that interest in Warrior Cats is sagging and probably won't ever come back to its peak levels.

In addition to linking, I suggest a combination of Youtube/video marketing and press releases about similar, but different niches other than Warrior Cats. Pinterest may also be an option.

The writing is on the wall...Adapt or die.

Can anybody help...please...I'm in such bad shape here and lost and exhausted. I spend literally several hours a day trying to get this site in shape. And absolutely nothing is working.

What exactly will writing high-end articles do for my site? I think its problem is not enough people are seeing it. But the site's audience is young teenagers. Will they read these articles? They go on Tumblr, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter etc. {and I've been advertising on all of those}

??? Where is that? I said that they hang out on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, I am already advertising on those. What else do I need to do? I thank you for helping but I'm not getting the information I need. Please, Anybody, anybody PLEASE help! It's dire! Does anybody want to take a look at my site and get more details, I'm trying to give info but I don't know what info would help you guys.

I just need to know WHAT would fix the problem of my site not getting signups anymore, anything, I don't care what it is, if it's writing 50 articles a day about the site, I'll do it! But where and what do I write? I just need help!!!!

Thanks for the suggestion. I have noticed one thing: The book series that my site is named after and mostly based around is no longer producing new books and all the sites about them are slowing down and dying.

I want to get our site more broad, but how do I do that? I'm already adding and offering material for it, but my Statcounter is showing still that people only seem to click into the site for "Warrior cats" and "Warrior cats RPG" and "WCRPG" keywords.

How do I change this? I think this is what needs to change, and very quickly.

Did you have a look at my site?

What do I do to do that high end article thing? I do not understand how that works or how to get started, or what kinds of articles I would be writing.

Thank you for posting.

You say you're spending thousands of dollars every month on this site. So the first thing to figure out is: where is (most of) that money going?

Is it going to advertising? If so, then you're obviously throwing away your ads on traffic that doesn't convert. You deal with a situation like this by pulling it all back and running a series of small split tests. Measure the performance of everything. Paid traffic that fails to produce revenue is worse than useless.

If you're spending thousands a month on new code, it's way too much. Look for less expensive developers on Craigslist and elsewhere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_testing

what type of rpg is this? this weird man I never seen a site like this before.

There's an issue with redirection on that link. You might have to type it in manually.

I can safely say that this has nothing to do with the penguin update or the panda update or whatever in google. Analysing the growth stats going back through the past couple of years, the growth in signups actually peaked in late 2010/early 2011 and thereafter began to slow down. It was still growing throughout 2011 and into the first couple months of 2012 but by then it was plateaued, and after holding roughly steady this summer, it's begun to slowly slip downward, and we are in for real hell if it doesn't turn around.

In other words, I was an idiot and didn't see the writing on the wall for many months. I should have been focusing a lot more on the signup rate, where I was focusing more on improving member attrition. We have a horrid member attrition rate, standing at around 90%--though it's gotten slightly better this year for some odd reason, probably the only reason why we aren't even worse off right now.

(Heads up...rant coming. Not against you good folks, you've been wonderful offering your help and honest advice.)

I was told that this type of attrition rate is typical for forums and to just give up on it, I said screw that logic, I do not just sit down and sigh and say Oh well that's just too bad, my site is stuck with poor performance because that's just how it is. Rather what I am trying to do is sort out WHY most members don't stay, instead of just going "Oh well for a forum we're really not too bad on retention, almost 1 in 10 members winds up sticking around." Then by that logic I could do what I've seen forum owner after forum owner do when their site slows down, after trying the usual--member prizes, contests, competitions on the site and starting new topics, oh and look here's a new special signup bonus if you sign up today...when none of that works and their forum keeps on dying they go "Oh well I know I tried really hard and did everything I could, so it's not my fault that it's dying. It just happens." BS. It died because you {forum owner} didn't look beyond the standard stock advice to see what was REALLY chewing your website up and look at the underlying reasons why it was eating dirt.

So, straight from the horse's mouth: I went around and asked all my members what had made them stay. Virtually all of them said they stayed because they found a special friend or friends on the site. Conclusion: the people who left had failed to find this, within the first few days. Solution: add something to the site or change something on the site features wise that would help people find friends in common with them more easily.

Currently, that's what is gobbling up my budget. I'm having a programmer design a groups feature that will let people create their own mini discussion communities and invite their friends to it. It will be similar to Facebook, Deviantart and other sites that have similar groups. I don't know whether it will work, I'm trying it because I see it on many larger sites where it can be harder to find others. I've tried a lot of other things and changing the features one way or the other seems to be the only thing that is going to solve this problem.

Your thoughts? I also have a tag system and other things in the planning, but have not yet got them being designed yet.

On keywords: I have Statcounter and it shows me what keywords people type to reach the site. I am seeing keywords for other things besides Warrior cats but almost all of it is still Warrior cats. So we aer still not getting to many people outside of that fandom. It MIGHT be starting to change a little now, but if so it hasn't yet been enough time or effect to turn things around.

To see what's popular on my site itself I just have to check out the most popular boards and see what gets updated the most often. I've put out a series of member contests to get them setting up some promotional videos, blogs and other material. A few links have gone up, but it's not been enough time.