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SpikeAshlye
New Member
57 Posts |
 Posted - 12 October 2003 : 00:57:05
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I have been trying for a while, can someone please tell me what the trick is to get people to start coming to my community?? Please I've got a good start but I needs some people to come and start posting, and some expierenced people who can be moderators at the boards. All my boards need to have at least one moderator, and I've been having trouble finding people no matter what I do....
Can someone help?? tell me what the trick is or how I get the word out?
Is there something wrong with the way the commuinty works??? Maybe someone can give me some advice. I just want people to start registering so I have something to do, it's a pain in the butt to be admin and have no new members when you come to your website. :(
http://www.jonescomputersolutions.com/jcsbd/ |
Edited by - SpikeAshlye on 12 October 2003 00:58:11 |
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weeweeslap
Senior Member
USA
1077 Posts |
Posted - 12 October 2003 : 01:30:13
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Trick to get the word out, well advertise at other sites that are similar to yours. Get them interested enough to visit your site. A good domain name is always a good start, though good domains names are 99.9% of the time taken already, so something close to good will work. Ads meta tags? Get spiders/bots to crawl your site and have good keywords on your home page and other pages. For example, in a search in google search, altavista etc etc etc search engines you search for "roller coaster track exchange" and the #1 result 99% of the time is WeeWeeSlap.com, my site  My site became popular because I became popular at what I promote on my site. I do roller coaster gaming and my name got around through word of mouth from being a member at this other site. Then I left and started my own. A little over a year and I have 3,200+ members registered at my site with people now wanting to buy my domain name, at a good price simply because it is now known in what I do. SO in essense my success is attributed that my name became known in what I do at my website roller coaster gaming design virtual roller coasters anyway.... back to your site, I see you cover different areas of web design. A good detailed hme page (http://www.jonescomputersolutions.com/) with good wording on it should get spiders and bots hovering it. ALso the very must thing you have to do is get other websites to link to you. Web links is a great way to get known. Even paying for ad space helps greatly. I paid for advertising, dirt cheap advettising at this other coastergaming site and aquired about 50% of their members. Basically just go to other websites, get into the spotlight and "sell" your website to the audience, not sell $ wise but idea wise so they visit. Also a nice looking layout will help better too.
I am not good at giving advice and I probably onfused you a bit as I confused my self too reading it over but you get the idea?
WWS |
coaster crazy |
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jrbp
New Member
USA
63 Posts |
Posted - 12 October 2003 : 09:45:18
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| There's one problem with your forum, you should have to approve of people that are trying to join your forum. What if someone had a quick question but had to wait a day to get approved before he/she could even post their question so instaed of waiting all of that time they will probably go somewhere else. |
Josh Roy
Midtown Madness 2 Department of Motor Vehicals
My Forum |
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sr_erick
Senior Member
USA
1318 Posts |
Posted - 13 October 2003 : 14:01:01
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1. Why do all your boards need moderatiing or a moderator to start off with? Your forum has hardly any traffic yet, wait untill it starts to get going, then worry about moderators.
2. You can't just build a site and expect people to come and post. It takes time. Just because you register a domain name, doesn't mean people know it exists.
3. ALL of what WWS says is true. Advertise. Once I got listed on Yahoo! after many months of trying, my traffic instantly jumped up. I now have my ad at many other sites that are related to mine. I have members that advertise for my on other forums. I have many good recomendations. Again, all this takes time. It is not start and go, you have to work your way there.
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Erick
Snowmobile Fanatics
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Cailean
New Member
Canada
75 Posts |
Posted - 14 October 2003 : 01:40:13
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quote:
Originally posted by sr_erick
1. Why do all your boards need moderatiing or a moderator to start off with?
I agree, over-moderation can scare off visitors 'cuz they think you're really picky about who/what can posted, etc. At least hide the Moderator column to begin with.
The point about validating new members is good too, I can't even count the number of times I've found an interesting site/forum, gone to post something and then can't be bothered with a complicated registration.
Your Moderator/Member ratio is so high that I doubt any "bad" posts will be up for very long anyway 
Other than that, layout is good and categories/forums are logical. If you want to be kinda sneaky (and creative) you can setup a couple of dummy accounts and post your own questions which then (impressively) are quickly and easily answered by you! This might prompt others to post questions. |
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MarcelG
Retired Support Moderator
Netherlands
2625 Posts |
Posted - 14 October 2003 : 06:52:18
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I've been trying also, and it tends to get frustrating at a certain moment.
I think that a psychological marketing approach is necessary ; study your aimed member and ask yourselves the questions such as:
- what's the audience of your site ?
- what would a member gain when coming to your site ?
- what would a member gain when participating on your site ?
- what's the subject of your site ?
- what would a member want to see ?
- where should you 'advertise' ?
At a certain point in time your board will reach critical mass or not.
Once over that point, your members will be your site, they will contribute, ask, and answer, attract new members, post news, etc etc.
It will be a social community, with social classes, bosses (admins), chiefs (mods) and bigmouths (the members with 10000 posts).
However, just as with building a city (SIMCity), there needs to be a common interest for the audience.
At my site, I don't have a specific topic.
The english (free) translation of my site (and subtitle) is On the Attic ; much about nothing really...
My motto and policy is simple : behave ; I give my members the complete freedom in the topics they choose, as long as they are not in conflict with my hostingprovider (no porn, warez etc).
Freedom of speech to the max ; The rest is up to them.
However, my community has only grown to a stunning 28 members (wow....), with about 4 active members, in 10 months. I started 30/12/2002....
One of the causes might be that I choose to keep the site in Dutch ; this limits the audience to Dutch speaking people (NL and BE), and therefore the potential member-list will be shorter than when you choose to have your site in English.
I am nearly giving up hope, however, it will only cost me $ 70 a year to keep the site, so I am not going to close it.
No-one knows what the future might bring.
The Fok!-forum (www.fok.nl) had an enourmous boost when they started discussing Big Brother (the TV show), when it first started in the Netherlands.
Before that they were just a small community, with I think less than 100 members.
Now, several years later they are almost the biggest online community in the Netherlands which is NOT computer-related. The Big Brother hype is long gone, however Fok! still exists.
They reached critical mass back then, and still profit from it. |
portfolio - linkshrinker - oxle - twitter |
Edited by - MarcelG on 14 October 2003 06:55:42 |
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MarcelG
Retired Support Moderator
Netherlands
2625 Posts |
Posted - 17 October 2003 : 11:37:13
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I see you switched to WebWiz Forums instead of Snitz (or am I wrong ?)
quote:
source http://www.jonescomputersolutions.com
The website is currently being uploaded, and configured.
In the mean time please feel free to register and post on our community.
Not that it's any of my business, but I'd like to know your motivation for that swap.
Just wondering. |
portfolio - linkshrinker - oxle - twitter |
Edited by - MarcelG on 17 October 2003 11:38:27 |
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