We asked the staff - “What do you do in your spare time away from forums and the internet?”

Here are the answers (Some people took it more serious then others):

Sbfc - I sometimes go out and play snooker and football and also I spend time with my family. Also I go to school, sleep, get dressed, clean my teeth, breathe…

Raymond - I play on my school’s basketball team. Also hang with friends and just overall like to have fun outside of the internet world.  I also mentor 5-12 year olds in my school.

Perry - In my spare time I am studying Media. I also have just got a part time job at McDonalds, were I am working at the moment until I finish my course at University - I then hope to become a producer for the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation).

MrJohn - On my spare time I like to go jogging, work out, or hang out with my girlfriend. Once in a while I go bowling or play some kind of sport with my family. Or you can catch me watching whatever sporting events are on TV. Other than that working.

MurderheWrote - I play football (soccer) most Wednesday nights as part of a local 5-a-side league. Other than that I work full time during the day, and when i’m not doing that I like to play Pool and go enduro riding.

Van1lla - I go to college most days and work some Saturdays and all Sundays. Other than those i usually go out with mates driving most nights, go to parties now as its Xmas Holidays and every Wednesday round one of my mates houses there is a little Pool league where there’s about 6 of us who play.

CarMadMike - I’m a student, spend a lot of my time learning the French language too.

Elimanater71 - In my free time i like to play many different sports and i Hang with friends doing alot of random junk. I also usually have to watch my 3 and 9 year old nieces.

CarsonK - I spend a lot of time online, and I have currently been spending a lot of time reading a book on PHP, MySQL, and Apache, and should have it finished within a couple of days.

Twisted Fairytale - I play a few games on my computer. Or i’m at school. I am a really huge gamer, so I spend most of my time on the computer.

Cloverfield - I really have very little hobbies outside of the Internet and forums. I’m usually busy with my University course. I guess the only other ‘hobbies’ I have is watching football and playing the Xbox.

Sadly, a lot of forums we see promotion at ForumPromotion these days do not last. Too many Administrators expect ‘microwavable forums’, in other words 100,000 posts and hundreds of members within just weeks…needless to say, this will never happen. To help new forum owners find their feet, this article outlines the 5 tips required to build a successful forum. Enjoy.

Does your forum attract the guest’s attention immediately? If not, it should! The truth of the matter is, nobody is going to spend time looking around your whole forum in every category and sub-category for what they want to see, they don’t have time. Once a guest lands on your forum you have to show them what they want to see…fast! If they can’t find what they’re looking for within a matter of seconds, they’ll leave…it’s that simple. For example if you own a promtion forum don’t fill the place with general chat sections and games forums with the actual ‘promote your forum’ section half way down the page somewhere…it needs to be at the top, clearly visible and easy to access. Remember that there are hundreds of other forums like you so you have to do everything possible to make your site accessible and easy to use. Provide the guests with clean, clear and visible links they can use to reach your important areas.

Finally, an essential factor used by guests deciding to join your forum or not is loading time. I can almost guarantee members will not join your forum if they have to wait more than about 6 seconds for your page to load. A good way to reduce loading times is to avoid the use of unneccesary images, flash components and scripts.

When making or managing your forum, always think about the kind of members you want on your forum. Build your forum around the kind of members you want to receive. For example, say you’re building a general chat forum for teenagers, here you’d expect Slang in forum descriptions, a wide range of similies, a bright / fun skin and a big colourful banner. On the other hand if you’re building a webmaster forum for people aged 30+ you’d expect professional forum descriptions, a professional skin and very few features such as restructed avatars, restricted sigs and very few smilies. It’s very important to always think about the members you want to get on your forum and what they’d want to see on your forum. Give them something to keep coming back for whether it’s ‘virtual cookies’ or a ‘buy, sell, trade’ forum. Remember to keep posting quality content and keep making regular updates to the forum as this will show your members you care about it.

Try to make everything as clear as possible. This section mostly effects those of you who own promotion forums. Use a separate forum for each service for example “Promote your forum” would be one forum, the forum below it could be “Promote your website” and the forum below that could be “Promote your blog”. Do not use forums such as “Promote your site here”, as this will confuse the user and make them ask themselves whether they can promote their blog / website or not. The human mind naturally expects to be told what to do when they visit another site and unless you clearly show them what they can and can’t do they are likely to be reluctant to post. Similarly, if you own a general chat forum make a separate forum for general discussion and another for forum games. By focusing the guest’s attention on different areas of the site it makes them more confident in posting, in that they know where to post post and not get told off by a moderator for posting in the wrong place.

When starting a new forum, it’s easy to overstaff. Too often on ForumPromotion we see topics in the recruitment forum saying things such as “New forum in need of 3 Admins and 5 Mods”. The truth be told this is a classic example of over staffing. When I ran the PixelRaider forums (a community of over 100 members) the staff concisted of One Administrator, and one Global Moderator..nothing more, nothing less. Contrary to common belief, having an army of moderators does not make members feel ’safe’ or ’secure’ when posting. Rather, if anything it will make your members feel intimidated by mods who wants to use their ‘powers’, and more importantly will make them reluctant to post. Only recruit moderators once you start to see spam or members start misbehaving…other than that…there is absolutely no need to.

Administrators, get involved! For me this is the key to a successful forum. The Administrator should be someone the members look up to, respect but more importantly someone the members can interact with. If the Admin is always posting in topics, responding to feedback topics and applying suggestions, making regular updates and welcoming / getting to know the members it portrays a strong message. It shows that you care about the forum and the members, it shows you want the forum to be a success and mos timportantly it shows you’re not only in it for the Adsense revenue. If you’re an Admin, don’t just sit back and let the moderators do the work for you, you are the keystone of the forum and your actions reflect upon the outcome of the community. Always try to be kind and polite to members, make them feel as if they’re the only ones that matter…that way you can be sure they’ll be back tomorrow ;).

I hope the 5 points I have mentioned above help everyone to start, or improve their own forum. If I saw the changes above applied to most forums I visit, you can be sure i’d be signing up to most of them that are promoted. I wish everybody luck with their forums and hope that this article helps in building your community. =)
Best of luck everyone!

Christian
- Community Team Leader

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!

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.

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.