Hello,

We will be taking the time to ask every one of our staff members an organized question, every month or so. For this time, we started asking our question on October 19th, and have gotten almost every one of our staff members to answer.

The following was asked to our staff members:

How would you spend 50,000 dollars/25,000 pounds?

Efc2008 - I would probably buy a V.I.P box at Goodison Park and then get a nice car. If there is any money left I would put it away in the bank or something.

CarMadMike - I would buy a nice Audi A5 ~razz~

Cloverfield - I would buy my favourite car, BMW 330CI, pay off my university debt then buy 20,000 lottery tickets

Murder He Wrote - I would buy my favourite car: A white Audi S5 with White Alloys, tinted windows and Rieger body kit. Preview -> http://www.autowp.ru/pictures/audi_rieg … eger_5.jpg.

Assuming that doesn’t cover the $50,000 the rest would go towards insurance for it

Damien - I would buy a classic mini and spend loads making it look nice

dremits - I’d purchase shares or invest in starting up a business.

Van1lla ™ - I would probably buy a batch of driving lessons, get my first car, do it up and then put the rest away to start topping itself up.

1ruleyou - I would put it in the bank….I have nothing to buy

carsonk - I’d probably put a lot of it towards college, and then put a bunch towards a new computer, along with 7 TB worth of hard drive space, and some nice software.

sbfc93 -  I don’t know what I would spend that money on. Maybe invest it towards a new house?

Subz™ - If I had £25,000 i would;
-Clear my debts would would be about 1K
Buy a top of the range carbon bike costing about 5/6K
-Use about 10K as a downpayment on a morgage.
-Buy a top of the range pc and other electrical equiptment

If there is any left I would invest it or buy some shares

Fowler - I would buy a new computer and buy my own PS3 so i don’t have to keep using my brothers. The rest i would save

Dallas - That is a hard question. First, I would set back a lot for college. Spend about 5-10 thousand on a decent car to get me around, and through college. Then, with any left over, I would help my parents pay off some of their debts.

If you have a question that you would like to have the staff asked, please send me your suggestion via PM on the forums!

In order to encourage guests to sign up, the forum has to catch the guests eye and make them carry on looking at the site and maybe sign up.  The main way to catch the guests attention is to make the forum attractive.

The main ways to do this is as follows:-

• Have a nice looking style.  Make sure it is not too bright and not too dark either.  If possible try and have more then 1 style available as that can be a good promotional point so when people visit they might think i hate this style although if i sign up i could use their other one instead. Try to stay away from using the soft-wares default forum style as well as these tend to be overused and makes it look like not much time has been spent on the forum by the owner.
• Not have excessive clutter on the index page such as chatrooms/shoutboxes, excessive codes like marques, different colour texts, too many ads, pop-ups and other codes.  Anything you do add like affiliates, try to ensure that they are nice and tidy and look clean and not all over the place.
• Have a banner from your site and try to ensure it has your site name.  Try not to have it excessively big as people don’t want to always have to scroll down a lot to see the forum.  Also ensure that the file size is not too big.  The bigger the file size is the longer it takes to load.  The longer a site takes to load the less chance guests will sign up as they will get bored of waiting and just move on.  The same goes for excessive codes and so on on the index page as that slows the forum load time down also.
• Ensure that the text is easy to read on the site and that your site is cross browser compatible.  If you site works in one browser it might not work in others and you could lose a lot of people because the forum looks messed up
• If you use external hosts link imageshack and photobucket for example ensure that the images are always available as sites where images don’t show, expecially the logo or buttons put people of from signing up.

If you follow all these and the things in Part 1 then you should be able to encourage a much larger percentage of guests to sign up to your forum.  It does take a lot of work but it is worth it if you want your forum to be successful.

Hello Forum Promotion members,

This is the first of many monthly articles I will be writing giving my opinions in how the past month has been for the forum and what I am hoping for next month. Well I will start now with the forum does not look like it is going to reach 10,000 posts this month. I am a little disappointed with it but I am still confident of getting 100,000 posts before the end of 2008, which is the current target. We did hit another big milestone this month though by hitting 2000 members. I was really pleased when we finally hit it and it just shows how much the forum has grown. It also shows all the time and effort what staff and members have put into the forum is paying off and continuing to work. I would just like to thank everyone who has contributed to the forum and we wouldn’t be here if it was not for you, I probably would not be typing this blog post either. We have had quite a lot of staff resignations and changes recently. I was hugely disappointed when Travis (theezy) resigned from the community team. He was a good staff member and worked hard even when he was going through a bad time he put in his best. As you members may have noticed the packages are going through a bit of a crises at the moment and they keep have to close because of overloads. Carsonk recently appointed a Package Team Leader assistant, he chose TheExoticFish.com to take up this role. I hope they can work together to make sure that the packages don’t have to close every month because of an overload and I hope they can deliver the best packages for you. Someone who had a big impact on the team this month was Sbfc93. A lot of people question the decision to appoint him as package staff but I think the decision has paid off. He had an excellent start and he is a committed member who will try his hardest to complete as many packages, I would like to say well done to him. As for recent events we are thinking of a new contest to do for next month and are still discussing ideas for a new unique service to bring to you. I think overall this month has been a good one for the forum but was let down by a couple of minor things. I hope you enjoyed reading this and I look forward to the next month and lets hope we can take a bigger step to achieving the targets.

Thanks,
Efc2008.

One of the main things people forget when making and promoting their forum is guests.  Guests are what members start out like before they register.  It is important to keep this in mind when making your forum and promoting it as the site will have to be appealing of the people visiting won’t sign up.

One major thing people do is restrict the guest access.  That is fine to prevent them from seeing profiles, memberlist, who is online and posting posts and topics.  It is not good to hide all the forums from guests or restrict what they can see in the forums.  As a member your forum may look good with loads of forums and loads of good posts and content but how will the guests which are your future members see what your forum has to offer if the see a blank forum?

A few top tips:

• Open as many forums to guests to read as possible
• If you have a forum with content that you really don’t want guests to see such as downloads then make the forum visible but don’t give them permission to read the topics so they can see the forum exists and what topics there are but they can’t see the contents.  Or attach the downloads as attachments (if available) and not allow guests to download the attachments.
• If you have content that you don’t want guests or members to see hide it from view.  This is things like staff sections as there is nothing worse i think then going to a forum and seeing forums that 95% of people can’t enter.  You may as well make it hidden to everybody apart from staff.

This will make your forum more appealing to guests when you start promoting it and will increase the amount of members alot more then if you hide everything from guests.  If you have any more suggestions to get your forum more attractive for guests then post a comment below and i will add it into part 2.

This weeks interview will be with Fowler and EFC2008, as you know they are the founders of forum promotion, now one of the most successful promotion forums. This is a double interview, witch means we will see both Fowlers and EFC2008’s answers. This time I decided to start with some background information…

(Q) I’d like to start by asking you both, where you both met?

*Fowler*
“We met about 1 and half years ago on a previous forum i ran which was a general chat one and we both sort of became friends and helped each other with each others forums.  We then decided to make a forum between us which is how Forum Promotion started.”

*EFC2008*
“I was looking for a small football forum to affiliate with mine and I ran into Fowler’s. I saw a link to his general chat forum (hangout zone) and I signed up. As Fowler said we started to help each other with our forums and then decided to make a promotion forum.”

(Q) Apart from making promotion forums, what other interests do you have?

*Fowler*
“My main interests other then forums are mainly music as i do listen to my Ipod a lot when i am not on the computer and i am a big football fan and i like watching and playing football as well.  Nothing that interesting really.”

*EFC2008*
“Apart from forums I have quite a lot of different interests. I play and watch quite a lot of football because I love it and without it I do not know what I would do. I play some other sports like badminton but not as much as football. I do listen to music but only really when I am on the PC.”

(Q) Explain how you advertised forum promotion, and what you found was the best way to advertise?

*EFC2008*
“A lot of the first members of FP where from the freeforums support forum. We usually advertise on any forum we see what has an advertisement section. I know we submitted to quite a lot of topsites as well which has brought a couple of members in. From what I have noticed as the forum has got bigger we have been getting more members from search engines like google. I can also remember using a couple of banner exchange networks. For me I think the search engines and just advertising on other forums have been the most successful.”

*Fowler”
“We have advised Forum Promotion is many different ways such as posting adverts on other forums, directories, topsites and affiliates.  The best way we get members and hits is from search engines and our high ranking in the search engines has come from a large number of quality backlinks on other sites however the best promotion way we used is other forums like in sigs and places like that.

This is what helped us get active early on and it still does help bring in alot of members still but now we do have google bringing in alot of new members every day as well which is why we are growing even faster then ever before.”

(Q) What would you say is the best thing about running forum promotion.

*Fowler*
“For me the best part of running forum promotion was helping out the members with problems with their forum and helping them promote and watching their forums grow bigger and bigger and knowing that you had helped to make the forum successful and that is what i think the best part of running FP was for me.”

*EFC2008*
“There isn’t just one best part, there are lots of reasons what makes running FP so good.  One of the best things is knowing you played a part in making the forum big and successful. Helping other members out and giving support and advice about their forums is also good. ”

(Q) Whats the worse part of running forum promotion

*Fowler*
“The crappy hosts and all the problems we have had with the site because of our bad luck with hosts and servers.  That is one of the worst things for me as as you had put a lot of work into something and constantly seeing it down and people leaving the site because of problems it is quite upsetting as the problems are out of your control.”

*EFC2008*
“We went through a patch where we had lots of problems with hosting. We where having lots of problems at  lunarpages and then we moved to another host only to find out the server we was on has been suspended. We then moved to Cirtex and we had a bad start but we moved server and everything is fine now. Another bad thing would be when you log on in the morning only to find out the forum has been spammed. It is also annoying when you gets members who constantly break rules and think they have done nothing wrong But there is hardly anything bad about running FP.”

(Q) What advice would you give someone thinking about starting an advertising forum, would you Evan recommend it?

*Fowler*
“Personally i wouldn’t recommend it as there is so many about now and it is hard to make a new advertising forum and make it a big success.  Any advice i would give to people who want to make one is try to make your forum have something unique about it,  If it has nothing that no other ad forum offers then why would people join  forum with 5 members when they can join a forum which offer the same which has over 2000 members.  Thinking of something unique is hard to do and when you do think of something it usually gets stolen by another bigger forum so you lose that unique feature and again people will join them rather then yours as it is bigger.  That is why i would say it is best to not start another ad forum as it is hard to get your forum established and active.”

(Q)”What plans do you have for forum promotion for the next couple of weeks?”

*EFC2008*
“Well we are soon going to start thinking about a new service but that will take some time as we won’t something unique and that most forums do not have. We have just had the Referral contest and I think it went really bad, I was dissapointed the way it turned out. We did spend quite a  lot of time in promoting it and I expected it to be more successful than it turned out.

We may have another big contest later but we don’t want to reveal to much.”

This is the end of this interview, I’m willing to do a part 2 interview, but the part to interview will have your questions, so if there’s something you want to ask fowler and EFC2008, then please pm me, if I get enough things to ask, there will be another interview.