Member Avatar for krispy

Just found this site - very nice. Hopefully some of you guys n girls will be able to offer some userful advice (especially if you've built your own community site already).

Some of my work collegues and myself (we work in a small IT departmen) found ourselves becoming disallusioned with our relationship with business users, so created a website to let off steam. Originally it was just for us, but we've realised that there are other IT staff out there who feel the same, and go through the same stuff. So...

I installed and configured a CMS system (php fusion) on my PHP and Mysql hosting, and started adding articles and news, custom content, and a lot of silly stuff :lol:

I've done the usual submissions to search engines, but what we probably need to do is find suitable places to swap links with, directories, any anything anyone can think of?

Anyone found writing to magazines or online mags a way to get noticed?

Please take a look at our site; << url snipped >> see what we've got, how we're trying to grow it (35 members now, 2/3rds from outside our company).

Any advice appreciated - sign up if you like the tone (very surreal / angry / silly / fun).

Cheers, Krispy

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by >shadow<

Dani AI

Generated

Good start, — the surreal/angry/silly voice is a clear advantage. and raised good early promotion ideas; the next step is to make the people who do find the site want to come back. Below are practical, experience-based tactics that complement promotion and focus on retention, activity, and predictable growth.

  • Build a tiny core of champions. Recruit 8–12 people (colleagues or friendly contacts) and give each a simple task: start one seeded thread, reply to two others, and welcome new signups. Visible, regular activity convinces outsiders the site is alive.
  • Make onboarding trivial. One short welcome message with "three first actions" (read the Getting Started sticky, post your first rant, subscribe to the digest) gets new members into habit quickly.
  • Seed predictable content. Create 8–12 anchor threads that set tone and signal acceptable humor and quality. Use these as templates so newcomers can copy the format and join the conversation.
  • Capture and reuse the best material. Collect standout threads into a weekly digest or short printable cheat-sheet to drive repeat visits and build an email list.
  • Measure simple signals and iterate: new accounts/day, replies per thread, DAU/MAU ratio, and 7-day retention. Change one thing at a time and watch the effect.
  • Protect tone with light rules and a designated "Rant Corner" so the surreal voice survives without derailing the site.

First two-week plan: seed 12 threads, invite champions, set up a single welcome message, enable a weekly digest, and record baseline metrics. Small, steady wins will compound.

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Member Avatar for Dani

Hi! Welcome to DaniWeb. Sorry I had to snip your URL. We have a strict no link policy in these forums to weed out spam. It also prevents every thread from turning into a site review instead of a discussion that can benefit everyone. You can post a site review in our Website Reviews forum: http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/forum55.html

That aside ... it seems like you have yourself a nice niche that is attracting a good community. Kudos! One of the major things you can do now is, like you said, do some advertising swaps with other sites that offer a complementary product or service ... sites that target your audience but don't compete with you. Word of mouth and return visitors are going to be the #1 way people will get to your site.

Something else to do is find another forum which complements yours and post, post, post in it! Use a link to your forum in your signature. It will help distinguish you as an authority in the field as well as drive targeted traffic from forum-goers.

Member Avatar for krispy

Thanks for the comments - and I realised I shouldn't have posted the url when i scrolled down your forums and spotted the better place. sorry about that.

I'll continue to try and find complimentary sites as you say - better to share links with sites that share a theme or ideal I guess. :cheesy:

Member Avatar for >shadow<

you can just do what i do--have my url at my signature and then when posting something like your topic i say -how does this blah blah blah on my forum (link at signature)

enjoy the forumz!

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