Have you ever offered a download to members of your forum where guests would like to get their hands on it and theyve registered, got what they wanted and left? We have tried to entice people to register with a few free downloads which we advertised on YouTube, we had a lot of sign ups and the majority of them seemed to take what they wanted and left and never re-visited. Has anyone offered a download to members only like this and found they do this? Anyone had the opposite where they actually stay and become an active member? Is it worth offering content like so when this is the outcome? Anyone been able to get these people interested in coming back and if so what methods did you use? Thanks!
Most people will just grab and run. I think that the only way that an offer such as this would work is that the new users would need to make a certain number of posts in order to download the file you're giving away. Even then, you will have a ton of "yes" "no" "I agree" types of posts, and they'll grab what they want and never return again. It's just an unfortunate side-effect of the internet.
I'm beginning to believe in contests! Again, you'll get a lot of those short posts, but if the goal is far enough away, then you can moderate those posts and set them back. Newsletters are good, too. That way, you can offer the download through your newsletter, and your users would continue to at least get your newsletter and perhaps be enticed to use your forum.
For my downloads section only people with 10+ posts can get it and I have discounted social forums so that only those contributing useful posts to useful conversations will be upgraded.
Yes, I finally created a promotion based on post count and created a secondary usergroup. On my main forum, registered users can not download files until they have made 3 post in the forum, an after the promotion script runs and moves them to the other user group. And then, they can only download 5 files or 100 megs every 24 hours. My sons gaming forum, that is probably what I'am gonna have to do there as well. If you are using vbulletin and the downloads II modification, put a limit on how many files people can download in 24 hours. I think 5 files is a good limit.
