Rebranding my site

As our anniversary rolls around, I have discussed with my members about restructuring our site.

My reason being is that our site's name solely revolves around ONE BOOK series however

1. Our site has forums for other book
2. And the book forum that our site is named after is literally dead. When members join the site, they do not join for that book. They Instead join for one of the other many books we have discussion forums for.

I received universal support for this idea of rebranding the site from the members however most said they want to have the site's name related to ALL BOOKS instead of centering around one book and i agree.

My questions are......

1. The site for all intents and purposes is meant to be a site to discuss books that we are fans of. However, books don't even make up 10,000 of our 80,000 posts.

I think there are a total of MAYBE 4,000 posts related to the books. So it brings me to ask why bother rebranding the site as a universal book forum when the initial roots of the forum was meant to be the books.

The site seems to be most active discussing General Chat: Movies, TV, Music, Gaming & Small-talk

OR Society centric topics such as Current events, the debate forum and the forum to discuss things like teen things such as sex, dating, teen issues, etc et

I believe if i removed the books that the site wouldn't suffer too much but i'd hate to remove them simply because that is how we started.

So should I keep the site name related to books OR should i aim for somethign that inclusive of all our topics.

The site is geared towards members 15-21 and i was thinking a name teen related would be a better fit but they seem to think a universal book name is better.

2. Has anyone ever re-branded their site? Was it an easy transition?
What all did you do? Pros & Cons?

 

You could easily add an entertainment/technology forum, with the books area being a sub-forum of that.

 

That's a good idea

 

It would work out nicely because it gives the users another area to discuss things. The books section have always been your forum's backbone, so there's no reason to remove it. Just move things around, that's all I would do as well.

 

I wouldn't say it's the backbone....it's initially the reason WHY i made the site but the book forum feels like an after-thought compared to the General Discussion forum and then the Music, TV and Music forums.

 

Why rebrand? If you have a domain more keyed towards the new release of a book, why not create a basic, informative couple of html pages that link back to your forum sections Perhaps RSS feed some of those posts from your forum section onto that html page.

I have rebranded a few sites. If you can get the core community to buy into the concept of a rebrand, then perfect. If not, then you have a choice to make. Do you keep that site as is, stand to watch the site possibly die off or lose organic traffic to a competitor witj the new book keyworded everywhere on their site or re-brand and stand to watch members freak out and perhaps leave. I believe my HTML page idea could work well for you.

From experience I have re-branded maybe 10 sites, 4-5 big-boards. It was a tough sell to be honest. At one point on a forum we went through domains, registered, were about to migrate and we had to slow down because some people were trying to block it from happening. Politics and BS ensued. I walked away from the idea. I was tired of the crying, the users loved their home, the site but couldn't see the writing on the wall. The brand was dying, the traffic was down, the shelf life had expired.

To generalize is to kill your site. That's what I believe. All my general auto sites never did as good as those focused on a niche. The niche brought the members together. The members created the fun, general environment. Invest more time on the topic.

 

This is great advice!

 

to follow up
We've rebranded and kept what our site was about originally but expanded upon the site and now are more inclusive of a lot more things now. Members are responding positively to the changes

 

are you getting a lot of feedback? If so, what are the people saying?
Did you change out your URL?

 

What did you change and/or add?

 

How did it effect your traffic and ad revenue?

I was told by Google Adsense that I should change my site to .com instead of .us as a lot of their ads are only aimed twards the big 4 domain extensions of .com, .net, .org and .edu. But I am nervous of a big loss of traffic do to issues with the search engines (even though I plan to set the .us to forward everything with a 301 redirect.)

 

.com is the way to go, always.
I think .net & .org follow.

Country domains are awful, i know. I have owned a ton of .ca and when re-branded to .com seen significant increase in traffic and ad revenue. While I can't say for certain that both are attributed to the change to the .com, I personally do believe that is the case. Also consider that if you are catering to North America, or the world some people are loyal and will not surf a .ca if they are from the U.S. or vice versa, so I am told.

 

Well for starters...we aren't solely focused on books.
We started as a book forum but i realized the books really weren't that active so now the site is geared towards people 14-25 years of age that features the books but also anything cool that is relevant in this age group.

Sex
Movies, TV
Music
Video Games
Celeb News
Fashion
Creative Writing
General Chatting

I don't have any ads...not even sure how to use it
But as far as traffic....all my current active members are still active and i've redirected the domain to the new domain so it seems to be fine. nothing adverse and they love the changes...nothing too monumental and drastic. In fact for the most part, everything is sort of the same just expanded......