thinking about changing to a general discussion forum

I'm thinking about changing www.locoforum.com to a general discussion forum, focusing on art and music,, has anyone else made a general talk forum ? do u have any suggestion for keywords and traffic to target ?

thanks in advance
-Brandon

I havent. I would imagine it could be difficult as there are so many keywords to chase.

ya, i know.. I'm been thinking of what topics I have a strong interest in...I was thinking maybe something directed more local...
and I'd like to keep the url, because of how hard I've been working for back links.
maybe I should gain an interest in locomotives :p

or mental health? http://www.exquisitelyerotic.net/forums/images/smilies/frog.gif

Ouch, I bet that one hurt! Naughty girl, Ohio ... and where do you get that frog (chameleon?) raspberry blower from? Like it. :D

from my site..................... ya want it, come and get it bwahahhahahah

ya,.. thought about that too :D

like the "CraZy Forums"

I think I'll just pull back on the direct attention for the bands, and pull more towards something general and fun. Still have to think it over.. thx for the suggestions, or post.. keep em coming ;)

General chat forums are a little too diluted, and are probally the hardest to market. You are stuck with the daunting task of having to aim for general generic terms, being unable to exploit niche terminology which isnt as a competitive. It really isnt advised, and you've got www.offtopic.com to go up against. Never a good sign :)

EDIT: Which is a incidently great example of how PageRank isnt always the be all and end all of determining a websites reletive success. PR 5, yet has over 57 million posts :o

I have some PR5 pages.. with 222 members...lol

anyways, I'm working on getting more content related to Art and then I'll work on Music..

After looking at what search terms ppl are using to find this site so far in search engines, I know I can get the traffic, the trick will be making them members. :(

thx for the advise, I knew a general forums would be hard when I started this thread. I was thinking more and trying to generalize the forum more.

wish me luck :D

..with my newest vB forum (I converted my previous one to phpBB). I'm probably going to add a general conversation area with sub forums. My forum is targeted at professional disc jockeys but you really cannot ignore other stuff that's going on in the world. Frankly a forum that concentrates on one specific topic only is boring to me.

I'm not getting any traffic from the search engines. I just up vB a couple days ago so it's going to take a while to get indexed (peek at my spiders (http://www.ourdjtalk.com/spiders.php)). Google seems to love me while Yahoo only looks at my index. :(

Anywho, I was thinking of throwing a few random keywords into the meta data for instance cookies & banking. Just to see if anything happens. Has anyone tried this?

My problem is content it's a new forum and I don't have much other than announcements a couple posts I've made. I have > 10 members so far so there isn't many member to shake down for content. :eek:

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Another idea I had is to combine my two forum based sites into one site just with seperate forums. They're both target at the same market. I'm kind of a loss of what to do, without traffic it seems like a lot of work for nothing.

I'd stay away from general forums like I stay away from general directories... If you had one and it was established fine but if not just tooo much competition IMO.

Best is a niche forum with massive general area so it's like a chill area to talka bout whatever when you aren't getting all nichey