I was recently asked about the importance of creating a portal in addition to an already successful forum. The concern that was shared had to do with the possibility of the new portal distracting users or taking them away from the community. While I can understand the concern, I feel confident in saying that the upside much outweighs any possible downside. Let me explain…

The advantages of having a portal in addition to your forum are huge. It doesn’t make a difference if your forum is one day old and without members or 2 years old with 25,000 members.

The benefits are as follows:

• It provides you with a platform to build content your users will enjoy
• It will get you in to more CPM networks
• CPC ads perform better on “content” pages, so it will increase earnings
• Can be a great help in the SEO game when targetting certain keywords with the content
• It shows the community you are working to “improve” their user experience
• It separates you from the forum only crowd and provides an increased perceived value

This is a short list, but I think there are even more reasons that you could think of as to how this will benefit your community, your earnings, and the overall health of your site. If you are serious about building something “special”, then don’t wait. Get your portal in the works now!

I have recently had a reminder to do something on all my forums that I did long ago on Sprint Users. The welcome email that vBulletin sends out by default looks something like this:

Dear YOURUSERNAME,

Thanks for registering at FORUM NAME! We are glad you have chosen to be a part of our community and we hope you enjoy your stay.

All the best,
THEIR NAME

While this looks nice and professional at first glance, remember there is always room for improvement. Why not add a few lines with links to important forums, hot topics, or other interesting features of your forum beneath the nice welcome? The idea is that you want new registerants to become ACTIVE, so help them out and prod them in the right direction!

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com

In an article at useit.com, Jakob Nielsen looks at lurkers vs. active contributing members in a forum or community.

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

Nielsen gives some examples of participation inequality in social networks, review sites, blogs, etc. But he gives some good ideas for how to overcome, or at least reduce, participation inequality:

• Make it easier to contribute. The lower the overhead, the more people will jump through the hoop. For example, Netflix lets users rate movies by clicking a star rating, which is much easier than writing a natural-language review.
• Make participation a side effect. Even better, let users participate with zero effort by making their contributions a side effect of something else they’re doing. For example, Amazon’s “people who bought this book, bought these other books” recommendations are a side effect of people buying books. You don’t have to do anything special to have your book preferences entered into the system. Will Hill coined the term read wear for this type of effect: the simple activity of reading (or using) something will “wear” it down and thus leave its marks — just like a cookbook will automatically fall open to the recipe you prepare the most.
• Edit, don’t create. Let users build their contributions by modifying existing templates rather than creating complete entities from scratch. Editing a template is more enticing and has a gentler learning curve than facing the horror of a blank page. In avatar-based systems like Second Life, for example, most users modify standard-issue avatars rather than create their own.
• Reward — but don’t over-reward — participants. Rewarding people for contributing will help motivate users who have lives outside the Internet, and thus will broaden your participant base. Although money is always good, you can also give contributors preferential treatment (such as discounts or advance notice of new stuff), or even just put gold stars on their profiles. But don’t give too much to the most active participants, or you’ll simply encourage them to dominate the system even more.
• Promote quality contributors. If you display all contributions equally, then people who post only when they have something important to say will be drowned out by the torrent of material from the hyperactive 1%. Instead, give extra prominence to good contributions and to contributions from people who’ve proven their value, as indicated by their reputation ranking.

Out of this list, my favorite is “Reward — but don’t over-reward — participants.” There are so many things we can do for our users as forum owners. From reputation systems, to “kudos” like I use at dreamincode.net, to free giveaways. Even things as simple as member badges or titles can encourage users to contribute and participate.

You can read the entire article here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com

It’s our staff that spend countless hours keeping our forums clean of spam, chasing after problem members, and generally making our communities the great places they are. They let us dedicate our time to promoting, enhancing, and building the community. Why not say “Thanks” during the holidays with a nice gift?! Here are some ideas for inexpensive gifts that will really make your moderators and staff feel good about helping out:

• Magazine Subscription Related to Forum Topic (Usually less than $25 for a year)
• Gift Certificate Related to Forum Topic/Location
• Personalized Promo Gifts (Pens, Key-Chain, Desk Toys, etc.)
• Personalized Chocolates (Hershey Gifts)
• Custom T-Shirts (If you order more than you need, these make great contest prizes too!)
• Visa Gift Cards (Minimum of $25+Fee)
• Custom Label Wine/Beer
• Premium Subscriptions to Related Sites (Especially if your mods write content for you)

Those are just a few ideas. I’m doing something pretty unique this year for my team at dream.in.code, but I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag here With any of these gifts, it’s always good to include a hand-written card to say “Thank You for all the hard work and time you spend. I, and our members, really appreciate it!”.

Please share your ideas, or interesting gifts you have received from an employer or someone you volunteered for.

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com

Established forums are becoming very desirable properties. Just ask Lee – he’s recently sold several larger sites very quickly for very good prices. Across the Internet landscape, large and small companies are being snatched up left and right. For example, did you read about Sony’s acquisition of Grouper? Grouper holds less than 1% of the online video market (where YouTube is king at 43%), and doesn’t have a dime of revenue. But that’s okay with Sony – they just paid $65,000,000 in cash for them. (Go ahead, count the zeros.) It’s funny, because they get as much traffic as we do every month…

Okay, so how does this apply to forum owners? While Internet forums are not nearly as hot as video sharing websites, we should still take away a few lessons from those who have been bought before us. Now, before you decide to stop reading because your beloved forum isn’t for sale, understand that I know you are attached to your site (we all have some level of attachment), but if some big company came along and offered you a whole heap of money for your site, I think you might reconsider that stance. But the key is that if you aren’t ready for that offer, it won’t happen. With a little bit of foresight, you could avoid a whole lot of heartache later.

We all need to run our forums like they are for sale on the open market. Why? Because everything is for sale and there are plenty of shoppers out there with money to spend. How you run your site before the sale will determine what caliber of buyer (and what price tag) you can expect. And I am not only talking about traffic stats and Adsense screen shots.

Treat Your Records – Traffic and Otherwise – Like GOLD. What is it, exactly, that you own? Your online real estate is totally virtual. It could go -poof- into thin air in the blink of an eye. So, too, could your traffic stats, financial records, and other virtual data. Do you back up your website? You should be backing up everything, all the time.

In that same vein, make SURE you have a long trail of traffic stats. I don’t care about just the last three months of a two year-old site! I care about the last two years. And don’t use the, “I changed servers, so I lost my stats” crap. You can still keep that data. To me that says poor planning, and if you are that bad at something so simple, it leaves me to wonder what else you may have missed in running your business.

Does Your Bookkeeping Hold Up? How many forum owners treat their forum like a business? Whether that means hiring a virtual assistant to do your books, or simply using a program like QuickBooks to do it yourself – it needs to be done. We are very fortunate that keeping financial records for a website is generally very, very simple. But simply having that record is HUGE. Take the time NOW to make sure that you get what you deserve in the event of a potential future sale. This isn’t something to try and backtrack on later. A business with good books will sell far more easily than one with shoddy record keeping. (Oh, and you should keep good books anyway, but that’s another post. )

Get Everything in Writing. Do you have special arrangements in place with other sites or vendors? Do you swap banner space with any other sites? Do you get a discount on advertising on any other sites? Anything that you have arranged with any other website or business should be in writing. If it isn’t now, write something up and make it official. As a buyer, would you think twice about the future of these relationships as the new owner? You sure would.

Make sure that you are not currently harboring any of these buyer red flags. If you are, deal with them NOW and not later:

- Poor traffic stats history
- Poor advertising management
- Poor bookkeeping (incomplete, improperly kept, etc.)
- Undocumented business relationships
- Undocumented systems and procedures (Could someone run your business if you died tomorrow? If not, it’s time to start writing down what you do.)

For anyone that is reading this thinking it might not apply to them since Google, Microsoft, or some other massive entity won’t be buying a basket weaving hobby forum anytime soon, this kind of preparation can have just as large of an impact on businesses with much smaller price tags. I saw a site for sale recently in the gaming niche that had a ton of potential. Great idea, good programming, good name. Unfortunately, the owner had a server crash and had lost some members and all traffic stats. The site was up for sale with no actual traffic or financial information. I doubt it sold for the $1,000 starting bid, but if he had proof of the stats he claimed he had prior to the crash, he would have gotten at least 5 times more than what he was asking. It’s a good lesson to learn. Your site is only as good as what you can present at the time of sale.

So starting today, keep your records squeaky clean and run your site like it was actively for sale. You never know when that offer will come along that you can’t refuse, and with proper planning, the deal may actually come to fruition.