Content/Activity growth

[The Voice of Reason]

my suggestion is that you grow the sites membership and activity.

I am sure this is something you are interested in otherwise why bother running a web site, but I make this suggestion with focus and direction.

There are a few small areas that are active on these boards geographicly. In order to create growth activity and usage there needs to be a critical mass of involvement. I am sure you know all of this but well I got some time to kill typing it out for you

I suggest that you build on your strengths. The South section is pretty strong, the exception is the South Western states. It might be a good idea to include other key words in your site description to get more hits from those specific areas. For example Charlotte is exceedingly well represented, but how do you get more members from Texas cities?

In the North East, Rhode Island/Providence is very healthy, and Hartford has a decent representation, but the rest of CT is dead. The most actively developing cities in the NE are Boston and Stamford yet they get very little action. How do you seek out new members to flesh out the other areas?

The west area is a graveyard

and the mid west is really just Michigan.

I would love to se more activity in other areas on the forum as I like to read about other areas and travel. So I guess my only suggestion is to try and grow your membership in the areas that are slightly active before you loose the few posters from those areas.

Cheers!

[Neo]

We're aware of the lack of representation of some regions of the US on this site. Unfortunately it is a bit like the chicken and the egg. Most of the users that find us are either by word of mouth or by Google. Obviously word of mouth requires someone to recommend the site and if there is a lack of activity we're not likely to be recommended for that particular city or region. Traffic coming from Google is ranked according to the amount of content available and the amount of links to that content from other sites. Since we lack both for some of the cities and regions represented on here we don't rank very high thus we simply don't get the visibility.

Recently we have been spending money on advertising on other sites and we have spent money on optimizing our site for search engines and continue to put more resources into gaining new membership and expanding our reach. Unfortunately things like this don't happen overnight and as much as I'd like to see areas like San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, etc. blossom in our forums, the best weapon we have in our arsenal is our current users that have interest in a particular city or region. This site has blossomed in sections like Grand Rapids, Charlotte, Providence, etc. because of a small amount of users that were dedicated in providing content. I remember being the only person online in the Charlotte section at times and almost having conversations with myself, but now it is impossible to be the only one active in that forum.

Slowly but surely we're seeing more and more activity in sections that have otherwise been stagnant or non-existent so I have great hope that in time sections that are considered dead right now will be alive and well in the future.

Any tips on how to gain new drive for cities and regions is always appreciated!

[Lowerdeck]

Best I can say is... if you have some familiarity with, or have visited a few times, any particular city, go post in there to make any conversation. May not be great, but at least it's a start of something.

I'm found most in Conn. (and Mass. when that's active), but I venture to all the northeast sections (except Pittsburgh, since I never been there and know very little about it.)