How vbulletinsetup helped me

Hello everyone. I wanted to take this time and tell how vbulletinsetup helped me and my forum to a successful start. I have always been a pretty good admin in my own right, but for some reason I always felt I was just one or two things away from a successful site. So I searched the web looking for information to help me with my new site idea. I have always wanted a site where you could freely speak your mind and argue. So I thought I had the extra money and I should go for it. So I opened Argue Crazy. But before I bust it open on the public I needed some knowledge to get me back in the game. I had not been an admin in a while and I felt that I needed to relearn all that I had forgot. So I searched all of the forums and I found vbulletin setup.

I joined the site in March of 08 and started reading and learning. They have so much valuable information here for you to read. And It took me about 2 weeks before I felt like I was ready to open my site and give it a try. So in April of 08 I opened Argue Crazy. And since then I have continued to seek advice and information from Brandon and his staff. And I must say it was tough at first, but from what I learned here I began to see some nice advancement in my site. And I have even made vbulletin setup sort of my home away from home.

But lets talk about the success I have achieved. I am not making tons of money. I am hardly even making any, but the site has begun to improve a lot in traffic. We have even, with the help of the nice people on this site, held a place on the first page of msn and breifly on google. We have been trying harder and harder to maintain those rankings. And as I currently type this we are on the first page of msn, and the second page of google, for out main keyword “argue”. And it finally feels like we have broken through the glass ceiling so to speak. We have amassed over 100 members and over 5000 posts. These are great milestones for our site.

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Advertising:Real World

Hello again everyone. It has been a while since I had a time to post some things. But I am back with another one of those useful posts, at least I hope. Anyway, lets get to it.

So you made your website and you got it all ready to go, but now what? Well it is time to advertise. So how do you do it? Where do you go?

I have often found myself in the same delima. Should I go for the real word or the internet. So here are my thoughts on advertising in the real world.

Real word advertising

First lets look at the pros:

1. No limits(Unlike the internet, there are no limits on where you can advertise. In the net world if you always have to pay for optimal placement. In the real world, there are no laws on ambush advertising.)
2. Ambush advertising(This is a great tool in the business world. You can put ads anywhere or even if your crazy enough, places where they are not supposed to be at. This is a great advantage. I mean what can they do? Take your ad down, destroy it. But, it will be seen. Some, of the best ideas for this are; overpasses on busy highway, sides of buildings, street signs, crowded areas, college bulletin boards, flyers on cars, so on and so forth…)
3. Full control(You have full control in the placement of your advertisements. Even if they are taken down, before that you have full control over where to put them)
4. Word of mouth(In the real world trends travel fast. People see something they like and tell someone else. This is an advertisers dream.)

Ok now look at some of the cons:

1. If you advertise in the real world people have to go to a computer and type your site address in.(This is a huge disadvantage next to the internet where you can just click a link)
2. In the real world any type of advertisement is going to cost you money(Paper, radio, whatever your gonna have to shell out some change)
3. In the real world there is no way of stopping people you don’t want to see your ad.(You can throw up a robots.txt and keep stuff hidden from the bad bots. And works same way in real life, bad people will see your idea.)
4. You give competitors a visual target(This is very important in marketing and advertising. You never want to put a bad image out there about your product. If you advertise something thats not solid, someone will have a way to attack you.)
5. It is alot of work.(You cant copy and paste your ad everywhere. You have to get out there and put it where you want)

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Holidays and Contests

Well hello again boys and girls. It has been a bit since I have had time to talk to you, but I thought I would talk about how we as webmaster can take? advantage of holidays. I know ok, so your thinking people wont show up on a holiday, and most times you would be right. But, If you take the time and set up a nice contest, they will come, they will most definitely come.

So What do you mean?

Well I have always thought that holidays are the best time for a nice contest to improve member support and or gain more members.? So say for instance labor day. An easy contest would be to ask people to write and let you know what they think of labor day? Or you could do a post contests. I like 1 day post contests the most. You get people to show up and contribute as much as possible in one day for a nice prize.

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How Google Analytics can make you more money

Hello all again. I thought today I would write about how one can use Google Analytics to make more money with your advertising.

If you don,t know by now, Analytics is a free traffic tracking service from Google. It gives you loads of information on where you traffic is coming from, and where it is going. But, it is the best tool for increasing advertising revenue I have ever seen.

But, before we get into that you must learn two terms. The first being bounce rate. The Bounce Rate for a single page is the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page. In contrast, the Bounce Rate for a website is the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a website per session divided by the total number of website visits. Basically it tells you which pages on your site keep your traffic flowing. The lower the bounce rate, the better the page is at keeping people’s interest in your site.

The second term which I am sure everyone knows is Unique Visits. A Unique Visit presents a single, unique viewer who has visited a web site within a specified time period. Now that you know what they are, lets explain how they can help you make more money.

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Your Happy Website

Hello, I thought I would write today about keeping your website happy. A website is just like a person. And if it is a happy website, then everyone who visits will be happy. I know this doesnt make much since but allow me to explain. There are things that make a website happy, at least in my eyes:

1. No Downtime
2. Lots of new content
3. Making money
4. Friendly people who understand this is someone’s baby

No Downtime

The most important thing is your hosting. Because if your site is not up, then its not happy. You spend all these hours putting together this nice new site you can be proud of, but then you surf to it and its down. This can be a very frustrating thing. So, what do you do? You contact your host, but they don’t seem to care as much as you do. Then, you have to take all this time trying to find a new host. It’s just a big headache.

So how do you know whats a good host?

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So you wanna get members?

I notice these days that there is a site a minute popping up, but people don’t exactly understand how one gets and maintains members. They think they can just throw a site up and BAM you have magic. A website takes a lot of hard work and time. But after many years of learning the hard way, I have come up with what seems to be a fool proof plan.

Step 1 The Name

One mistake people seem to make a lot is having a website name that is not relevant at all to their site. This hurts you so much in the web world. You have a site names applesandoranges.com, but you’re selling hats. Now these people come to your site and see there are no apples or oranges. Well needless to say they aren’t going to come back. That’s equivalent to lying to ones face in the web world. So always think very hard about your name and make sure it’s relevant to your content. If you can pick a word for your name that appears multiple times in your content this will help you tremendously later on down the road.

Step 2 Picking a host

Now you are asking why does this even matter. Well, a lot of times people go for cheap hosts who offer unlimited this and that. In most cases they are probably someone who oversells their hosting. This is not always horrible thing, but it could end up costing your site up-time. And every minute your site is down, that’s a minute you could have been making more members. So take your time and investigate a host. The best way is to hop on Google and look for reviews. See what people think, and also check their up-time. They have many sites online that monitor up-time of hosting companies.

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