Any ideas for my site to pick up activity/visitors again?

Well, long story short, while I've been back a few weeks now, a decent amount of the activity died when I couldn't update for about two weeks due to my computer giving up the ghost and having no form of internet enabled device to login to the forum with. Since then, while activity has sometimes peaked up a bit a few times, it's generally been lower due to the time of year being when everyone's back at school and work, and the said computer dying took out some of the content I was actually planning to add to the website.

So, any ideas for promotion or to restore activity? I know there's the reminder emails mod, but part of me worries that it's seen as spam just by existing. I'd like therefore interesting promotion ideas, preferrably that don't involve great sums of money being spent. Ideas for modifications would be nice as well.

Yeah, I don't even need to say the name of said site, I only own the sole forum due to wanting to make one site reach big board status before opening another.

 

Thats the problem, the reminders emails mod only seems to work for a small portion of people now with it not being updated. We had it installed and it took 6 hours for someone to report it, apparently they were getting three emails per minute from us because of it having bugs.

 

It worked for me, I'm just worried people will see it as a spam (despite it being easy to opt out and only sent to people who don't opt out of admin emails). But I'm personally looking for better promotion techniques.

 

If you have an old DS lying around, throw up a contest for somebody to win it.

 

No ideas on promotion but id like to add my .02c about the reminder emails. I dont believe it would be seen as spam if you dont abuse it. I send out reminders every 6 months and haven't had a issue

 

I've only had to use mass admin emails once, and I received a very positive response from members. Even the ones that declined to come back as regular posters.

A contest seems like a good idea to me, but if you have limited membership right now, how would you get new members to find your site and join for the contest? That's the quandary for me.

 

Well, I guess I'll try the reminder emails again soon, although activity has sort of picked up again in the meantime.

 

I'm trying the reminder emails, but I almost know this will likely be somewhat ineffective.

 

Apparently, we've been encountering this problem as well as of fairly recently. One idea I've tried was making a video of the site in action and post it to YouTube which came to some small degree of success.

Another idea that I heard kicking around was the use of making a MySpace, Twitter or FaceBook account for it, but the one thing I'm worried about is how to promote it correctly.