Alright, it has been far to long!  The time has come for a fun contest.  I am one that really enjoys contests, ultimately I love to give stuff away.  I got a sweet gift from YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network) this past Christmas and I held back part of what they gave me in order to give it to one lucky winner through this contest.

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 am right in the middle of creating business cards for the moderators of one of my forums so that they can hand them out to people they meet of like interest. I am printing them through VistaPrint which will prove to be rather inexpensive, my moderators are eagerly anticipating their arrival, it will provide cheap promotion and encourage them to do word-of-mouth advertising on my behalf, and it doesn’t take a lot of my time to get this done.

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!

Since my large forum upgraded from vbulletin 2 to vbulletin 3.0 in the summer of 2005, I’ve scratched my head over a drop in traffic. The numbers didn’t make sense which added to the mystery.

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

“According to Hans Peter Brondmo of Plum during the SES San Jose session “Marketing with Social Media“, 1% of those involved with social media are creating content, 10% will enrich that content and 90% will consume it. That’s a lot of influence wielded by content creators and those that reblog and mashup. Think about what you can do to enable content creation as well as the repurposing of that content for what might possibly be the most productive outcome.” Source: TopRankBlog.com (emphasis added)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has long been the most important three-letter acronym on the block. Not any more. Move over SEO, SMO is about to crash the party. How does your forum stack up?

I was poking around at TechMeme recently, and I came across a blog post that referenced a great piece titled, “5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO).” Since I believed I was up on my Internet acronyms, and this one escaped me, I thought I would take a look. I am glad I did - it’s great food for thought for forum admins.

Blogger Rohit Bhgargava has coined a new phrase for us:

“The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”

Aha! You mean there wasn’t a name for this? Well now there is, and you can thank Rohit. So how does this apply to forums? I thought I would take my favorite 5 rules (actually, now there are 17 in total, but I will only talk about 5 here) and see how they apply to message boards. There is something in here for everyone, and you can probably guarantee an increase in traffic if you implement some of them.

1. “Make tagging and bookmarking easy.” Do you use social bookmarking like del.icio.us? Are you familiar with tagging? These tools are used widely in the blogosphere, but I rarely see forum admin make these tools easy to use for its members. Why not add a small “Digg This” button to each thread? Why not add a couple of syndication buttons to each thread/post so users can just click to save? (Note, don’t go crazy with the buttons! Depending upon your audience, one service may be more popular than another. If you are going to add anything, I would limit yourself to two or three services and make SURE they are not huge!)

2. “Reward Inbound Links.” Very interesting. I really like this one because it’s just plain nice to recognize new incoming links, and it also encourages more. I could see a small section in the sidebar of a forum index with an area for, “Recent Incoming Links” or something where is lists the last 5 places that have linked to you. Implementation is easier on a blog (using trackbacks, etc.), but there are already link reciprocating scripts that can verify incoming links, so I would imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to get this in place if you come up with a method for verification. And if you are worried about sending people to other sites via outbound links, stop worrying. There are a gazillion sites on the net at their fingertips. Don’t let that stop you from rewarding those who are linking to you. You are crazy to think that not giving readers outbound links is going to keep them on your site.

3. “Be a User Resource, Even if it Doesn’t Help You.” This one goes with the last part of #2. Forums are the ultimate collaborative effort. Encourage the creation of resources that people really WANT within your niche. Encourage collaboration amongst members to add to specific, relevant topics and then create really great one-page resources on those topics. (And when you become the ultimate resource for the specific topic, make sure that the proper social bookmarking tools are listed!) All those new inbound links will drive lots of targeted, free traffic.

4. “Reward helpful and valuable users.” Love, love, love this one! Forums are a natural environment for this kind of system. vB already has a bit of a rating system in place with thread ratings and reputation, but I think you could go a step further. Consider showcasing a member every month. Emphasize quality and not quantity. Consider implementing badges to recognize the best/most helpful members in different categories. Consider allowing other members to vote in order to get everyone involved. The options are limitless here, but the message is the same: Reward the members who have made your site what it is today. You wouldn’t be anywhere without them.

5. “Don’t Forget Your Roots, Be Humble.” This goes with #4 a bit, but it deserves its own mention. Don’t ever forget where you came from. Every forum started with zero members. Your members ARE your site. They drive the creation of every new page. I have seen some sites implement changes that the masses hated (like a new design or taking away a feature) and the admin took on a ‘like it or leave it’ attitude (seemingly because they felt criticized). It’s not pretty, and it’s also not necessary. If I may be so blunt, cater to the every whim of your members (within reason). You may not be able to do everything they want, but you darn well better look like you tried. Don’t get too proud and don’t rest on your laurels. (I look forward to sharing the details of our new design launch because we really tried to implement this, so stay tuned for that.) And if you want to know what it’s like to act like an a** to the people who made you what you are, check out Facebook.com’s idiotic blunder.

I think the main thing to remember is that media is changing. I would argue that bloggers tend to be better at implementing changes to take advantage of the social networking/bookmarking/media tools out there, but forums really haven’t tried. Perhaps it’s due to their size and clunkiness, or perhaps forums just already do a good job on their own, but I know that there are several ideas that I plan to implement in the near future on our forum based in this list.

Oh, and before anyone emails me that “Forget SEO!” is bad advice, let me say that I don’t mean to completely forget it. Just remember that while Google has done its darndest to return the best, most relevant results, there is still crap all over the place. Social tools imply human interaction, and that human interaction, in my opinion, produces better results in determining what’s good and what isn’t. As such, I think these social tools with dominate the future… Okay?

by Laua Alter, NoteBook Forums

Last spring I found myself in a difficult position. For whatever reason, that I’m still to this day unsure how to explain, Google sidelined my site. For any keyword where my site would have naturally shown up for searchers, my site had been hidden. Some say I was penalized. Others claimed I was victim of the Big Daddy roll-out.

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