Everything posted by Shawn Gossman
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Eyebrows aka anchovies
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I'd also like to nominate [mention=5]Cpvr[/mention] :) He is probably one of the oldest forum owners I know, in terms of my years of experience not his age LOL but for as long as I've known him, he's always been friendly and helpful.
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Sometimes. If you have more staff than members, yeah, that's not appealing. But if you have a lot of staff doing different parts (like here) or you have a very active forum with a lot of members, I think more staff can be beneficial as long as they're all active. A forum full of stuff that looks inactive is an inactive-looking forum.
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When I first start a forum, I focus for about a week on making content for it. I want to give new members plenty of stuff to jump right into. After that, I'll usually start doing post-exchanges, signature stuff, and sharing it on social media. Then I wait for the first real member. It's exciting when we get them, isn't it?
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Fun game :)
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It reminds me of Circle. Not badly priced for a single domain license, either.
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That's the IPB that I remember using. It wasn't too bad back then, either. It's not bad now.
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I recently started a wiki project pertaining to the National Forest and state parks in my region. I'm excited about it but I'm guessing that I'll be the only one editing it for a while at least. How about you all? Have any of you ever started your own wiki before?
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Focusing on relationship development and audience pain points is one of the best ways to create a highly engaging community, in my opinion. 1. Develop relationships with your members. Treat them more like friends than members. Become BFFs in your community. 2. Discover your members' needs, wants, and pain points. Solve them. Give them easy answers on your forum. Do this as often as you can. I feel like the two strategies above will create an extremely engaging community.
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Right now, my two main forums, AAF and OTF, are getting anywhere from 1 to 2 a day. I'd love to see it increase to around 3 or 4 :)
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I typically encourage this through sanctioned temporary referral contests. I have one going on now on a few of my forums. I'll launch them again but with bigger prize amounts and keep going up from there to retain interest in it. On my VB forum, I require referred members to PM me with the username who referred them. On my XF forum, I have an addon that does it.
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Mine was not backing anything up. I had a weather-related forum. I bought out my competition - spent over $1,000 for their forum. The forum ended up having about 20K members and a few hundred thousand posts. Then a database corruption occurred. I never backed anything up back then. My hosting service did but not everything and their backups couldn't restore everything. I had to start from scratch, and it never recovered. That forum has been closed for a long time. Nowadays, I manually backup my forums consistently and store them on two external hard drives so I can have a backup of the backup.
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You can choose the average price that everyone else uses or you can develop a reputation of creating the best content ever that gets a lot of engagement, then you can charge a higher price for your services noting that you focus on high quality and value. If people complain and say you're too expensive, just know that set of people really shouldn't be your target customer base. I charged $200 an article back when I did freelance writing. A lot of people said it was too high. Those people weren't really the customers I was looking for. The other ones that gladly paid me without worry were those who I sought out. Don't undervalue your skills.
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ProBoards is still kicking and strong. I remember using ProBoards around the time they first launched.
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Engaging content. My strategy is to create topics that strike emotion and make people want to respond to them. I try to use a mixture of controversy and copywrite.
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I really like Ozzy. He's friendly and easy to get along with. He's also a wonderful developer. Unless he good financially and wants to do other things, if I was him, I'd only develop addons that people are paying him to make. Not the paid addons anyone can buy and download, either. I'm talking about big paid addon jobs, custom stuff.
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Typically, it does. But for me, it's different. I don't like adding anything extra to the forum unless it adds a significant value to it. Most of the time, an addon is just another way to take attention away from the forum. Your forum content is what is going to grow your forum. If you take attention away from the main core function of a forum, you decrease the likelihood of getting content that will help grow your forum. So, since I rarely add them, usually when I do, it's exciting. :)
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When using my iPhone though, it goes straight to your forum without any error. Most people will likely be on mobile devices, so that's a plus right there.
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It's different but the only way you'll know if this works or not is to get beta testers. :) I'm happy to help them out to see how well it worked.
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1/2/4/5 are the only ones left right? and the locked 13.
