I thought I’d take a few moments to comment on how the new community is going now that we’ve been active for 3 weeks. Its been an exciting beginning for me.

We’ve added additional articles, activated over 200 challenges and over 1700 members have registered. Yes, in less than a month we are doing well, on track and daily the “average number online at one time” crawls upwards.

The challenges are really becoming what I hoped they would for the community. While we are a general topic website for women, the challenges nudge the members to some accountability for decisions in their lives. Getting out of debt. Reading a book. Updating their resume. Making time to work-out. The women are discussing and blogging about their decisions and supporting each other towards healthier living. I love that!

I’ve been asked where my traffic has come from. Over the past few weeks I’ve emailed small groups of members at hystersisters.com to invite them over. I am right up front with the invitation. “The owner-creator of hystersisters.com has launched a new website for women and you are invited.” I did this for a particular reason. I wanted my loyal membership base to know its “me”. If they appreciated the friendly, safe environment that we maintain for hystersisters.com and found help there, they will have good memories enough to take a look at my new project. While I know that they are not all fans (and I’ve had to ban a small number from hystersisters.com in the past 7 years) I still knew that the majority of the women will enjoy having a new website for a fresh start for themselves and their family’s benefit.

I’ve also set up a referral system which I hope will add to the viral marketing. The members get a special badge for referring two members. They get another badge for referring six more. What we find happening is that the age group is ever expanding to include women from 18 years old to women in theit 60’s. This is very appealing to me. I love having the younger women there to breathe “hip” notions into the discussions. I love the older women there to share with the youngers. What better way for women to help women than across generational lines?

This past week we set up the purge system for members who didn’t activate their membership. They are emailed a few times with their activation code. If they don’t click that link, their membership goes from “Users awaiting activation” to null. Yup, I delete those accounts so I expect our numbers to begin to reflect these losses within the next few weeks. Right now with over 1700 members, over 100 of them have not activated their accounts. I suspect those emails are in the filtered folders on Yahoo. I use Logician’s dynamic announcement hack to notify these members, trying to plaster it all over the place if they are “user awaiting confirmation” so they can go find their email. But still, with all the effort over 100 still did not find it.

On March 1 I plan to send out a newsletter to our members with two new badges that will be available and a few new articles. And from then on I plan to send newsletters every month or two to touch base with our members with new content.

I’ll try to keep things posted here on the growth and my plans as I work towards our newsletter. And my goal is for 2000 by the end of the month. Will it happen? Only time will tell!

By Kathy of HysterSisters and GirlsGetGoing.com