How to Promote Trailrunnerworld

[admin]

The hardest thing about starting a new site is, well, getting people to join it! Trailrunnerworld has the potential to grow to a great resource for the sport.

How do we increase membership and activity here at trailrunnerworld.com? Are there features we should add? I have a banner program I can run; but I'm not sure how effective those are yet.

Are there trailrunning clubs that might want a home on the web ? Their own forum area? Use of the calendar and review areas? Perhaps a very active blog for their club?

What ideas do you have and more importantly, how can you contribute to the growth and health of this newest venture?

[nickc]

Here's a few things I've noticed.

The two triathlon sites I know of that have active forums also have front pages with news, interviews, how to info, race results etc. The content drives people to the site initially. Your site has no useful front page content.

By looking at the front page, it's hard to see what the 'core mission' of this site is. If it's trail run reviews then the site author should probably have a few dozen already posted. It looks like you are relying too much on user content to get things rolling. You are only going to get a small percentage of people posting trail descriptions compared to many more looking for trail info. If people are looking for info they are going to want specific directions (e.g. gps info or maps), more than just some nice description.

I couldn't find any sort of facebook fan page. This is pretty much required these days. Look at ' go trail running 's facebook page. They are posting articles and vids 1-2x a day. This content gets people to their site.
I think you have too many sub categories in the forums. training and injuries could go together, trail reviews and trail running seem the same. I don't even know what hash house harriers is for. A single forum would be sufficient to begin with. If you get lots of off topic threads then start an 'off -topic' forum later.
So, to get people to the site you have to have content that people are going to find useful: training articles, equipment review articles, etc. From your description on the front page it sounds like that what you plan to do but I haven't seen any content except Jason's barefoot stuff and that was posted as a link in the forum. That sort of content should be on the front page instead of what's there.
One last thing is the top banner is too tall. It pushes the content too far down the page and cuts off the bottom of the map.
please take all this as constructive criticism.

[admin]

Thanks so much for the input and I agree completely with your assessment - I will work on getting those suggestions implemented.