Posts by Nikolas

That's the golden rule, never give up :)

It takes hard work to take off, but after that is really nice to see the results :)

The only thing I found working is changing the post variables in the register process.

Spammers use bots, that know your forum software. So for instance if you are using the X software they know that they must post to the index.php?action=register page with variables like username, password, passwordAgain, etc.

If you can change those variables, 99% of the bots wont be able to register to your forum.

Relevant forums are a great option to get some good links and promote your site.

As you are selling products, you may also try to use ebay for more sales.

That's true. Forums are not money makers.

Adsense is a good option, but as the people before me allready said, you can't expect much from your traffic.

Try the above link for some better results :)

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2005/10/six-adsense-optimization-tips-for.html?sourceid=ASO&subid=us_en-link-opttips&medium=link

Yeah I almost forgot of those.

I was getting good traffic from them back in the 90's, but for now I don't think that they can work.

Try other free traffic based promotions such us toplists.

I will agree with pulse.

Pagerank is about links, don't confuse this with the SERPs.

But I heared that in the latest pagerank update, there were some other factors added for the calculation, like frequency of updates. That make sense because there are many sites with pagerank 3 or higher that do not have one link back to them.

I guess as a forum's admin/moderator you reply to other people's questions more often than you ask something.(at least that is what I do :) )

But this doesn't mean that you don't enjoy your forum as regular members do.

Right?

Ok. Thanks for your comment :)

I see. My forum has not so big activity as there are only about 300 members with 7500 posts, so I keep repling on every post, but I am really not sure if this is good. On the other hand leaving those threads and wait untill someone replies is bad too, and the worst would propably be to make several accounts and post from them (I have done it in the past, but I think it is redicoulous)

he only advice I can give you is to POST POST POST yourself! I say this a real lot, but I might as well just repeat myself here, at the chance of being repetitive

At that part I would like to make a question. Is it good to post on every single thread in your forum? Isn't this image of the 'one man show' bad for you? I mean that if you start making threads and post replies to anyone else's threads is good for your forum?

I guess propably not. What is your opinion?

That's a very general question, and that really depends on you.

I have a forum with about 300 members, and the forum hasn't yet come to a state that can grow alone.
But for instance I meat today a guy that made a forum with 250 members in 12 hours!

Thanks for your comments :)

Very good thread :)

I read here that SEO experts say that pagerank is not used by Google anymore.

If that's true then why they keep wasting their multimillion dollar resources to keep it alive?

That does not sounds good to me.

Has anyone ever tried linkbaiting?

That's an uknown word for me. Can you please explain?

About the links, the key in my opinion is the content. No matter how many link partners you have or whatever else you have done to get linked by other sites, the real boost is coming when your content is so good that people link it as reference to their articles, forum posts etc.

A great example is this: Before 3-4 months one of my forum members posted a very nice article about spyware. I guess that the article was duplicate content, but that's not the point here. The point is that a guest in the forum who was member in a major computer related forum posted a link to my thread and sent this way about 1000-2000 visitors to my site.

The best part in this concept is that when your content rocks, you don't even do something to get links back to your site. It is like an automated process :)

Article bots? Propably you show that to my forum right?

I have this option to my forum (some bots posting news to the site), but to pretend the spam feeling for my members, I have deactivated those posts in the 'Show unread posts' list.

I think it is a nice feauture of the forums, as members can actually read news from several sites, plus those articles are indexed by search engines and help with the traffic of the site.

I agree. After all if a one line reply is a spam message you can allways delete the post.

After an extended search in the forum, I haven't find anything good about this topic, so I thought to start one.

Well everybody knows that a contest can bring lots of traffic and conversions to a web site, especially for forums.

The thing that I would like to discuss, is how do you promote the contest? I have just started a design contest, and I wonder how I can use it the best way to bring more traffic to my site.

I have searched Google for keywords like "submit contest" and found some sites to submit my site. I will add those later to the thread (when I get some traffic and know that it worths to submit)

Any feedback will be appreciated :)

I think the worst thing that can you do in a webmaster forum is to post a 'success story' of yours.

Before some days a kid had started a topic on another webmaster forum, of how he made 700$ in the first month of his first web site.

The idea of that kid was really cool, but the result from this post was a lot of copy cats sites, plus there were people asking him details - help to copy his site!

First of all 2000 visitors per month is fine for a new site, especially in your market where there are thousands of sites.

If your site's pages are allready optimized for the basics (h1, h2, strong, etc) you could try to buy some high pagerank, but relative to your subject links.

This can make you have a better ranking, but it will take some time to see results.

I will advice to submit your site to as many directories as you can.

It helps with the rankings, even if you don't have any SEO knowledge.

Maybe the two forums run on different versions?

If that is the case, put the version of phpBB that you have to your enstablished forum, and then upgade the new one.

Yes you can, but as both of the server work in the port 80, you should have alive one at a time.

I'm not sure what SMF is like, but with its old YaBB! counterpart, all HTML was hard coded in PHP. No templating system other than some CSS. Is this still the case?

No it is not like that. It has a template system(very good one) and the default templates are XHTML and CSS validated.

I use SMF. It is very easy to mod (if you know some php ofcourse)

In the past I have used phpBB too, but it is too unsecure and produces big overhead to the server.

A sticky post could help a little, but the fact is that the most of these people are just spammers, so the only solution is to delete their posts.

I would like to comment some of the opinions that you gave here.

First I think that deactivating signatures or any solution like this can cause only problems.

The objective is not to get rid of 1 post members, but to make those members feel good enough to continue posting. Let me give you an example. I found this forum through another site, and I thought it would be fine to post here one of my php articles to promote my site. If the forum wasn't so attractive I wouldn't continue to post.

Now about lurkers, I have found two categories of them. The one is the category spammers. They sign up, create a signature with a link (which will be on their profile page) and leave. It seems that there are bots doing this also.
The other category is the people who actually like the content of your forum, and they register to have the abillity of browsing the site better (check unread posts, etc.)

The only way that I found to make those folks post, are contests. Whenever I create a new contest I send a pm to all the members, and every time some lurkers are starting to post.

I believe that if you don't enjoy your community like a regular member, then you are not in the right way to make your forum a success.