How I Am Building Forum Traffic to My Politics Forum

I decided to try something different over the last 6 weeks. I always hear content is king and I am a firm believer that is true, but I wanted to see it in action. I have a project I have been dying to get into and it's all about politics. I chose this topic for a forum because 1. It's always a hot topic, 2. It's something I actually enjoy talking about, and 3. I feel like there is room for me and this forum to exist on the interwebs and offer a place for people to come and discuss.

I didn't want to spend money on SEO or traffic upfront so besides the forum setup I needed to grassroots this thing on a shoestring. I decided to only focus on content. To start, I bought a license from Xenforo and setup a stock theme and a couple free plugins as well. The investment for the software was minimal and then I turned my attention to content.

I asked a friend to help me get off the ground and post with me and she was willing to do so. We started on August 16th, 2013 with a brand new empty forum. So here are the stats for our first month:

Aug 16th-Sept 17th
Visitors: 679
UV: 283
Pageviews: 3575
Bounce Rate: 43.74%
Topics: 65
Total Posts: 100

The bulk of that success in 4 weeks was posting on our facebook, twitter, tumblr, and pinterest. I made sure we had social media at our finger tips even if it was just minor and really served to produce social signals to google. We only got a few signups during this period and it was mainly friends. Our forum was still empty and not much content was happening, but it was all natural. As you can see there wasn't much to write home about, but what happened next was pretty cool.

After we got through our first month we stepped up our content a LOT. The next 2 weeks we focused on content, instead of working on the forum, and added nearly 20-30 posts per day. Google was taking notice and our numbers through yesterday look like this in GA:

Sept 18th-Oct 4th
Visitors: 1483
UV: 1242
Pageviews: 3178
Bounce Rate: 79.10%
Topics: 199
Total Posts: 424

Now some of the numbers on both sets like the pageview difference was because I was working live on the forum more during the first 4 weeks than the last 2. I think the bounce rate is up because we still don't have enough content for visitors to "chew on" at the moment.

The difference of going over the 100 post mark was amazing. All of the sudden Google was loving all this fresh content and the posts are QUALITY posts. I didn't want quantity over quality. We achieved that goal. I embed video, images, and make sure there is meat on the topics. I did this all for free, all I had to do was connect the social signals with naturally built content and Google grabbed us up. During the last 2 weeks organic traffic accounted for 46.7 percent of the traffic, that's nearly half!

This exercise in "Content is King" is solid evidence that building content works and you don't have to spend an arm and a leg in getting a forum up and running. If you want to see what I am doing you can check out our political forum. Oh and I did no link building except sharing on facebook and other social media. This post, if considered so, if the first official link built by myself for this site.

Hope this gives some good insight on building forum traffic. If you also like politics join up, would love to discuss with some WF members as well.