Looking for advice on expanding website

[Lapras]

Hi, I have been looking to expand my website in a few ways:
1)I am hoping to make it into a more comprehensive website - with diverse contents including items such as arts, academia, sciences, religion, politics, op ed, new, etc ...
2)I would like to increase my visitors, there is not a significant amount at this time
3)I would like to find out who else would like to contribute content, or publish their own.
So my question is, from those with some expertise in this type of activity, how would you say I should go about it?

 

[jim1228]

Maybe start a forum or place where people can contribute content. A simple form asking people to contribute will do. Maybe give them some sort of incentive to do so. Content is king on the web, the more you have the more spiders will crawl your pages and index them. This will lead to more visitors to your site. So, you are going in the right direction with what you are doing.

 

[Tim_Myth]

It depends a lot on your target audience. If your target audience is a young, hip crowd, very interactive activities like shoutboxes and ajax components are the way to go. If your crowd is older or intellectual, make your interactive things less immediate like forums or blog comments.

You also have given a whole lot of info about your niche. What are some of the big players in your niche doing? What can you do better than them? If they offer a really cool tool, can you build a better one? If their forum is full of spammy posts, can you build one that cans the spam? What are they doing that you can do better? What aren't they doing that you could do?