So I have been running my Florida Gators forum, Gator Envy for a little over a week now. It’s actually been live for more than that, but I didn’t have the skin on it, but what maybe 10 days or so? I thought I would give a quick little update on what I’ve been doing and the progress of the site.
Well to start things off I did myspace promotiongs. I now have a Gator Envy myspace account with 250 friends on it. I send around 50 friend invites a day and also post about 2 bulletins a day. This was supposed to be my best marketing campaign, however I have received very little traffic as a result. When I used to run that Jacksonville Forum, I got every one of my members from Myspace. If I can’t start getting members, I will have a tough time getting my forum active.
I have also started posting on another Gator sports forum. I put my url in my signature. Unfortunately, you can’t have live links in the sig, so someone will have to copy/paste my url into their address bar instead of just clicking a link. That hurt’s also. On the forum, I have also selected a few people to PM just sending them a short message about my new site. PRetty much everyone I send the PM to does go to my site, but once again…getting them to register is a problem.
Today I submitted the site to Stumble Upon. This will probably bring in lots of traffic, but not many people will sign up as a result of it.
I plan to add fresh content to the site sometime this week or next once I figure out how to make a static content page. If anyone knows how to do this please let me know! I can not figure it out for the life of me. All I want to do is make a simply /stadiums.php page that has my header, navbar, and footer … I want it to look just like my forum, but instead of there being a forum body as the content, I want to write my own! PHPBB was easy because you just opened notepad and put in the include header and include footer code and that was it.
Once I figure out how to make a content page (I need one for Links), I will scour the internet for Gator sports pages and other sec pages or blogs and ask for link exchanges. I’ll aslo start my directory submitting next week. Oh boy is that going to be fun!
If you haven’t check my site out yet, please do. I finally figured out how to work vbadvanced and have added some cool section to the center column, including a CONTEST!!
5 Responses
Christoph
January 11th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
1You can’t start a forum doing it that way. Register yourself under 10-20 different user names and “talk to yourself”. Make the forum look active. You need at least 20 postings a day over a period of a month. Hire a forum posting service maybe. But all your marketing efforts will vaporize if you do not make the forum look active every single day.
Good Luck.
Christoph
Marc
January 11th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
2I have to disagree with Christoph. You will gain traffic over time. A new forum that grows organically will take a long time to really get humming. This is a young domain and site. Eventually SEs will send a lot more traffic. Grow it as fast as you can, but I think it’s a waste of money to pay for forum posting services and I think rather than spending time talking to yourself, you should spend time writng articles on some of your other sites. However, I do think it’s good to write an article that refers to a forum post. If you make a nice big juicy forum post then talk about the same subject on one of your blogs and point to that post. Keep the text of the blog post and forum post unique. It’s an easy way to produce twice the content and give yourself great relevant links. Plus it should be fairly easy to write the same kind of info phrased differently or from a different perspective.
Glad to see you had a good $$$ day after the game the other day. I think your sports network is beginning to take shape. I like to call a network of related sites like this ‘a constellation’, but that’s my own little visualization of each site as star linking to the others and collectively reinforcing the whole picture.
I think things are going well, just continue to pump out the content, get users to generate more of it where you can and continue to interlink between sites on related content.
Right now you’re still laying foundations. Once you have a little more inertia, in the form of content, things should begin to roll on their own with less pushing.
One last thing I think you should do on GatorEnvy is to rewrite those thread URLs to something SE friendly and relevant.
All of this is my opinion of course, but I’m motivated to give it since I really enjoy your blog more than the other internet entrepreneurs with blogs. Keep up the directory submission by the way, that should increase external linkage to your constellation.
Jacob
January 11th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
3I was thinking about how you might give Gator Envy a little boost and I thought about your site, Rookie Spot. Why not write a post about a new aspiring rookie that played for Florida this year? If you did that and then made a post at Gator Envy about the same thing and linked to it from that blog, you might get people to create accounts so that they can post their opinions. If you did that once a week with a different rookie, you might see an increase in membership and things of that nature.
David Lithman
January 12th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
4Thanks for all the advice guys. I know forums are extremely hard work. I remember the days when I first launched historum. It was brutal. I’m just going to keep pluggin along and filling up all my sites with as much content as I can.
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