No one has voted on any posts yet. Votes from other community members are used to determine a member's reputation amongst their peers.
21 Posted Topics
 | It matters what niche market you are in. Advertising (both AdSense types and sponsorship types), premium memberships, and donation links work, but you also should consider selling products to your forum members. For example, if you have a health network, you could create a store (using a program such as …  |
| | This is a problem all new forums have. How do you throw a great online party when everyone is the first one there? No matter how you get traffic (forum postings, blog postings, directory submissions, paid advertising, social networking, article directory submissions, etc...) you need to keep building content on … |
| | My thought is that keywords are still important to let search engines know what your pages are about, but they will carry less weight over time. Build sites and pages that offer good quality content. Getting your site or article bookmarked or linked to is far more important than how … |
 | Also consider Ning. You can make a free site and then pay for premium features such as using your own domain name ($5/month) and controlling the ads ($20/month). Ning allows you to make a social network type of site with forums, blogs, profile pages, videos, music, etc... Very easy to … |
 | If I were just starting out, I would test Yahoo first because it is easier to get your ads on the Yahoo search engine. Google AdWords can deliver a lot of traffic, but their "quality score" formula makes it difficult for some people to get their ads shown on Google. …  |
 | Re: SEO vs. PPC Another difference is that SEO can take a long time as you build content and links while PPC allows you to start buying traffic today. PPC is getting harder to do as more people are advertising online. The prices are going up and the standards to advertise on search engines … |
| | The level playing field is being altered. Instead of price and click through being the determining factors of which ads get shown, now Google AdWords has a quality score that requires much more from their advertisers. I think this is a good move on Google's part, but it is making … |
| | I bought traffic from Google before I had some sort of stats program. I wasted a lot of money because I couldn't see what the people were doing on my site when they got there. Now I have a good stats program and I can see what is happening on … |
| | Short term strategy is to spend a lot of money advertising your site while using a stats program to track the incoming traffic and make changes until you get a good conversion rate of sign-ups. Long-term strategy is stated above of posting on other blogs and forums along with submitting … |
| | You could use a service such as Ning that allows you to start a forum and social network for free and then you can pay for premium services when your site gets to that point. Starting a forum is tough so there is no shame in testing a few ideas … |
| | It matters what type of social network it is. If it is a general social network, then most people use them to connect with firends and participate in a community. If the social network is organized around a specific topic such as [URL="http://www.peaceisactive.com"]Peace is Active[/URL] or [URL="http://www.investeverymonth.com"]InvestEveryMonth.com[/URL], then people are …  |
 | Re: Maximum Bid Wow, old thread. Would be nice if we could still bu traffic for 5 cents. I remember those days : ) |
| | I would park the additional domains for now. Start building content on your new forum and blogs first. Once you have some content on the sites, try to find some other forums and blogs related to your market and start participating. This will allow you to start building some credibility … |
| | If you really want to make it easy, use Ning. It is a free hosted service that makes starting a forum/social network very easy. Nothing to load or requirements to meet. There are premium services and the ability to customize the features, but for a starter forum and site, nothing … |
| | Are you getting traffic, but no sign-ups or are you not getting any traffic? Do you have a good stats program (such as Google Analytics) so you can see how many people are on your site? |
| | Re: Thread names Changing titles to have better keywords or to be more descriptive is a good idea, but it may make users mad if you mess with their forum threads.  |
 | Most people will not participate in an empty forum, but if you have a specific niche like yours, then people will probably enter and post something. There are two considerations. First, will they participate in a low traffic forum? Second, does your site have the correct look and navigation to … |
| | Do a search for $25 Googlke AdWords credit and you might be able to find a coupon. Before you begin, understand that Google AdWords can be a tough nut to crack. If you are buying traffic for an established company/website with a big budget, then it can be pretty easy. … |
| | Antoher thing to understand about PPC traffic is you have to have good metrics in place to know what your bid should be. Are you trying to get people to sign-up for an email list or to purchase something? By knowing this, you can calculate how much you should bid … |
| | I think Google, Ning, and a bunch of other platforms have entered into some sort of consortium (OpenSocial) allowing applications to be shared across many platforms. Here's the link that will help you: [url]http://developer.ning.com/[/url] |
| | Make sure you have a stat reporting tool such as Google Analytics so you will know where your traffic is coming from and what they are doing on your site. Sometimes people are willing to join a site, but the navigation is bad or a link doesn't work causing people … |
The End.