Promotional Guidelines: Offer valid only through 2/15/2007 (midnight Pacific Time), for the first 3,000 who sign up with this code. Promotional credit is valid only for advertisers opening a new account with Microsoft adCenter. The $100 promotional credit does not apply to the one-time $5 non-refundable sign-up fee required to open a new account. Promotional credit must be fully redeemed in click spend within the first 90 days of sign-up.

Link to offer: Click Here!

The next few months will be exciting times around here as we give away over $40,000 worth of tickets to the coming Affiliate Summit West conference in Miami, Florida.

While at the conference, you will have to sit in on the best Q&A panel there, where Jeremy (shoemoney) and I will be discussing how to monetize online communities with affiliate programs. Hot stuff!

Look for more updates soon!

I am giving away my “brand new” YPN branded beverage cooler.  Basically it plugs in to a USB port on your PC or laptop, and chills your beverage while you work.  This is cool for a guy like me that likes to keep my Dr. Pepper from getting warm….yuck!

So, how do you win?

Basically, all you need to do is join my MyBlogLog community. I will be randomly picking a winner from those that joined my community one week from tomorrow (February 16th).  Now, the kicker is if you guys / gals drive enough sign ups to get me to the “Hot Communities” section of MyBlogLog, then I will also be throwing in an additional $100 through Paypal to the winner along with the cool beverage cooler!  It only takes a matter of 2 minutes to join my community if you don’t have an existing account, and if you do it will take 5 seconds.  Good luck!

I figured I would share this because it might even serve as a cool Christmas present to your team while helping to promote your site!

Registrations were just as high. First time visitors were just as high. All the stats that pointed to growth and healthy community seemed to be telling me that all was fine. But my stats for page impressions had dropped about 10-20 per cent. Instead of 50,000 page views per day (or more! Sometimes over 70K!) the page impressions showing up on Google Adsense stats and in my urchin had dropped to an average of 45K. It didn’t make sense.

I had wondered if we had over-loaded the pages with too many graphics, causing the page loads to be so long for many of our guests. Might be. I haven’t received a single complaint from a member so I don’t know.

I wondered about settings and would sometimes log into my admin control panel to stare at the settings, hoping something would magically jump out at me to tell me what happened in that upgrade. I wondered about the repeat visitors and the members who weren’t coming back as often.

One setting I found to alter was the “show number of posts” per page setting. Instead of 20 posts, each page would show 10 instead. This works only on those threads that are long and I only saw a small difference. Not even worth mentioning since we don’t have a lot of threads that are long.

The upgrade gave us some great new features as we had to spend 3 months re-customizing the software to add back all the special features our commumity enjoys. One of the features our staff raved about: content from the latest reply in a thread discussion in email notification. Several times our staff discussed the concern for this feature. On occasion when we had to remove replies, that content had already gone out to the members subscribed to that thread. We had discussed removing the content for that purpose.

But it wasn’t until I read Chris Kenworthy’s post here that I realized here was one issue that could make a profound difference.

Yes, I did it. I removed the content from our email notifications. It was an easy decision based on our experience with content being sent to members we had removed as inappropriate. It was an easy decision based on the many non-geeky women who join our website as their first online experience and assume their email notification is their one reply and they wonder why they don’t receive more. It was an easy decision to encourage members to head back to the forums to read their replies (more than one) and for the discussion to continue.

I edited the “language and phrase” email body for “notify”. It was easy and can be reversed at any time.

And yes, my stats are back on track which means a climb in revenue from advertisers and an increase in forum activity. Those members returning to read their replies may reply again or start another discussion.

Consider trying this out for a while to see if you find a difference in your traffic. If you don’t, you can always put it back.

by Kathy @ HysterSisters.com

Whatever the reason I was forced into a position to reassess things after I managed to get reinserted into King Google’s graces.

The Bottom Line

Only 11-12% of my traffic had come from Google. Another 4-5% via other online search engines. The balance of the traffic was being generated from direct hits. Word of mouth. Women telling other women.

While this is enviable, the month we were without Google’s blessed listing, I took a 12% hit in revenue as well.

Assessment of my website led me to one basic question:

How can I make sure that I am not dependent search engines?

Since Google reigns supreme in the search engine wars, it seemed silly to consider the answer to my question was found in Yahoo! I knew if I was to stabilize the traffic for the future growth of the website, it would have to be something other than Google. It would have to be something other than Yahoo! If I accepted the largest segment of our traffic comes from word of mouth, could I enlarge that influence?

Breaking it down into bite-sized pieces – Where?

Word of mouth was all ready working on my site so I had to understand where it was working well. And I had to understand where it could use some additional help. Women were telling women about the website in grocery stores, at school functions and across the backyard fence. Where else could my website be advertised offline that could make a difference?

The target audience of my website is medical patients so the answer turned out to be the most obvious. I needed to expand “word of mouth” into doctor offices. “Where” was a no brainer. “How” would be the most challenging.

How?

One of the best things my website offers (in addition to the personal support through the forums) is a group of emails written specifically to our members based on their perceived needs. The emails are content rich with helpful information and resources. I knew the information my website provided to its members would also be a great help to women in doctor’s offices. After researching the existing offerings for this specific topic, I knew there was a hole we could fill.

Taking the content and reformating it with some editting along the way, I contacted a local media group to make it happen. They took the content, created a gorgeous booklet (over 50 pages) and are funding the project with eager advertisers who have been the bread and butter of our online existence.

Within a month, the booklets will be in the hands of women, helping them offline through the wisdom of our online members. And of course, the stream of “word of mouth” will continue to bring many of these women online for the first time.

Think Outside Your Box

If you have considered how to add traffic to your site apart from the search engines, consider “Where” you could target and then consider “How”. While it won’t work for all forums, you might be pleasantly surprised to discover that the community you have provided online could be a benefit to others offline. And in turn, will ultimately build your online community with a steady stream of new faces.

by Kathy @ HysterSisters.com