I started http://lurkingmastermind.com in October under a different name (azhforum) and early this year merged it with a much older forum I owned (Devious Tyrant) which is why the forum appears to be older, established and content rich. I'm pleased with the URL I have now, it might be long it is unique and memorable and the latest PR update pushed me to PR3 from PR0. We have established members and are no longer just a fringe forum of the major community we were spawned from. That people choose my forum as a place to belong is a great achievement and one I am very happy with. Our stats are not incredible but neither are they disappointing. Currently they are:

Members: 774
Threads: 5,955
Posts: 136,347

Typically the members of Lurking Mastermind make between 500 and 1000 posts a day depending upon time of week.

We have a very active forum games section and have developed a strong community feel. The improvements made have been numerous. We have

• vBAdvanced
• vBSEO
• A choice of styles
• Arcade
• vBChat
• Free Image Hosting
• Custom usergroups
• News Posters
• A new MP game server
• Forum Myspace
• Affiliates
• . . . Plus much, much more. I trawl vb.org twice weekly for new stuff to add.

I have a myspace for the forum which is being worked on by one of our staff members and I have some reasonable affiliate links with other communities across Interwebland.

All in all I think you will agree that I am right to be quite proud of the place. Now I want to start taking the forum the next level. My question to you people is this: If Lurking Mastermind was yours, where would you take it? What would you do with it? How would you improve it?

I really want to make it into more than just a local success and to get known across the web. We're a general forum with no apparent focus which on one hand makes that difficult (we're one of many) but on the other means we're inviting to anybody. I'm going to put some adsense in to maybe generate some funds to pay for advertising elsewhere, but that's me out of ideas.

Suggestions please!!

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To be perfectly honest with you, I think you are right on track for greatness...You seem to be doing many things correctly that others just don't do. I say stick to it and keep up the hard work.

The only thing that is going to really launch you would be either a unique and viral idea or lots of money to advertise and promote. You're probably not going to get that unique/viral idea here, because anybody who has it is not going to share it

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It sounds like you need to do some free promotion, ideally a link building campaign. You traffic is not good at all, thus new members aren't signing up everyday and bringing new life to the community. I would go grab links through directories, forum posts, emailing like sites asking for links, and so on. Why not have your users (since I see many are graphically talented) make up a package of images, sig images, avatars, and offer them in a package for a free download to anyone who registers. Then you can promote such elsewhere...

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a package! how do you come up with this stuff!!!!!

*chase runs to the drawing board*

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