Converting guests into registered members

I'm averaging around 300 guest visits a day, but only 2 or 3 register for an account. Some questions:

1. Are these statistics normal, or is the conversion from guest to member at my forum too low?
2. What techniques have you done to entice guests to register for an account?

 

Are you sure that this number of guest visits excludes search engine spiders and other crawlers/bots?

Either way, I personally have no idea if those rates or normal or not.

To encourage registration, you need to have "Join Us!" links/buttons throughout the site in varying prominent locations. Try logging out of this forum for a minute and browse around a bit. You will see that in addition to the default registration link in the navbar, we have a nice button on the homepage as well as a little banner inside threads after the first post and every other 5 posts. This certainly should help some.

You definitely should look into adding a welcome header to the homepage. A little paragraph or list briefly detailing why somebody should register and how it benefits them. This is the first step towards improved guest-to-member conversion rates.
Here's an example from another of my forums: (it's an image so that spiders don't crawl its content)
.

 

Yep, I'm sure they are not bots - I have installed the MyBB plugin which recognizes most bot agent strings.

I'll think I'll do something similar to your Lineolated Parakeet Forum. The idea of using a graphic so that it doesn't get spidered is very good.

 

Can your guests see what content you have on offer? I simply refuse to join a forum when I can't see inside any forums. Why would I want to join a site I can't view first? Do you have exciting features that may draw users to your forum rather than others? If you do, make sure your guests know about them. It's no good having a really great feature if no one knows about it.

 

Yes, there are no hidden subforums. I don't know with exciting features, but AFAIK, only our forum provides some service no other forums or site in the Philippines answer - that of providing information on the national licensure examination for teachers.

 

I get about 500-800 visitors a day (not counting spiders/bots) and convert anywhere from 3 to 7 members per day on average.

So, your numbers are not too far off based on what I have going on. Maybe some others can give you some suggestions to help convert more.

 

Does that number exclude visitors that are registered?

 

Actually, it's not Nick. Now that you mention it, I have a better 'conversion rate' if I factor that correctly.

 

Nick, that is a good looking Welcome header. What are your thoughts on hot-mapping some of those other bold words, to link to their respective pages?

I wish I had the eye for colors some of you have. And could get this auld heid of mine wrapped around some graphics software, too.

 

My goal is to get them to register immediately after reading it. If all of the features were linked, they'd get distracted.

However, I suppose it wouldn't be that bad of an idea to map some of the listed features.

 

...map them all to register.php, that is.

 

Ha! Wonderful idea! :thumbup:

 

Two words - deep links

You might even want to change your image and have it point to some of your more informative threads or articles. You're still displaying the image on every page, so it's not as if you've lost your shot at getting them to register.

Just some food for thought.

 

Write some posts that everyone will have an opinion about. Some people won't be able to help joining to comment.