I thought maybe we can share some ideas on the different ways everyone promotes their site. I am sure everyone has some information that can help others out.<br /><br />For the last few years I have been members of various message board communities. After I decided to start my own there were of course a few that came over with me but what really helped get members over to my site was my signature. I put my website and a brief description of it into it and posted like crazy in relevant forums/threads. I put a lot of work into finding different forums that related to guitars that I could target. It took a while but it eventually paid off and has proven to be successful for my site.

Hi,<br /><br />I guess I am lucky in that I do not really have to promote it much anymore. When I started my site (almost 8 years ago), it was the only one of its kind on the web.<br />And while there are many others now (and several which have come and gone <img src="http://www.ubbdev.com/forum/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> ), we have many incoming links due to the longevity of the site. Our domainname is also highly targetted for the audience.<br /><br />Like you I also posted on a few mailing lists with my URL in the sigfile, but have not done so in a long time (too busy reading my own board <img src="http://www.ubbdev.com/forum/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> ).<br /><br />One thing that I have been meaning to do for the longest time is get stickers printed and place those in the nightlife areas in Bangkok (our target audience). Oh well, one of these days .... <img src="http://www.ubbdev.com/forum/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /><br /><br />Sanuk!

Yeah, I started out doing that for the first couple of months. Looking back, it was a lot of foot work but I haven't had to do that in a long time and my site is still growing strong through word of mouth and Josh's Spider mod.

Our site started it's introduction on a Sunday afternoon I made a huge splash on to the scene by posting a press release on every related blog, list, forum, group, community, that I could find online. Then shortly word of mouth was our messenger of choice, but since our community has a 'real life' counterpart we took to the streets. In 1999 we attended our first developer's conference. I had printed up flyers and handed them out to every one I met. <br /> <br /> The next year me and my two colleagues dug deep in to our pockets and got enough cash to make some promotional items we had printed t-shirts and business cards 4/4 full color. And handed them to every one we saw at the 2nd developer's conference. We had at that point 1,210 members. <br /> <br />We kind of got hassled by show officials because we were not official exhibitors. But the audience loved us none the less. The following year we dug even deeper and made the transition from ubb.classic to ubb.threads. This was a major improvement our speed was awesome. But we soon out grew our ISP I remember I got charged over $300 in one month because my traffic and my backups. So we switched ISP's, twice. We got hooked up w/ a terrible company. Then we dug once again and co-located our own server (Mac G4 & OS X) We had 4,795 members. <br /> <br /> <br />By the next conference the math worked out in our favor that for only $500 more the three of us (admins) pooled our funds together and purchased a booth at the conference. Ok maybe it was a little more with the freebee give-away. But we had a huge success our number one question was... How do you make money. - Our response was from our advertiser/sponsors. - the three of us. But we opened a door for making contacts w/ other developers and solution providers to facilitate banner ads on our site. In 2002, having 7,560 members made it more attractive to potential advertisers. <br /> <br />By the following conference we reached 11,165 and with having a small revenue from banner advertisement. And of course a few donations. Each year people are shocked we are there and can't fathom our business model. I'd admit it is no plan that Donald Trump would approve. But none the less our passion for the product and resource that we provide speaks volumes. By the end of 2003 we started to reach the bandwidth maximum from our DSL provider so I searched here and found VertexHost, and after wonderful reviews and recommendation signed up. The first part of 2004 got off to a rocky start but we pulled thru it with out a problem - just a reminder to everyone HAVE YOU BACKED-UP LATELY? Our patrons are blown away by the speed. With the additional ads I have sold and adding the google ads we generate enough revenue to pay for our hosting costs, plus a few extras such as hiring Josh to make some tweaks to the system, and purchased a few addons the spider hack mod and josh's Search Engine mod. In addition to myPaymentsPal have all helped in getting more revenue. <br /> <br />But our biggest boost in the past month has been a little mod I found here that for unregistered ones they can only see a few hundred words of any post/reply and are given a message that they need to register or log in to read the rest. This has made our membership jump to almost 100 new members a day. I am confident that we will have close to 17,000 members by this developer's conference in August. <br /> <br />Our next efforts will be to do some print advertising, in trade publications if I just can raise enough capital. In addition we are forming our own local users group this too should help our membership and revenues. <br /> <br />So the question was asked: How do you promote your site? With a lot of passion, hard work, and shoe leather, along with some deep pockets. But most of all the value added resources found here on threadsdev the knowledge and camaraderie found here is invaluable asset and truly is what enables me to provide useful and meaningful content vehicle to my members. <br /> <br />Thanks

I let other people promote for me. I just print and sell stickers, everyone buys them and uses them. <img src="http://www.ubbdev.com/forum/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

SPAM. I spam the hell out of people...<br />.<br />.<br />.<br />.<br />Just kidding!<br /><br />We spend between 10 and 30 dollars per day on PPC, and have for the past 2 months. It keeps traffic steady. <br /><br />At one time, we were getting around 2000 to 2500 unique visitors per day, then we had a really long downtime, like a year, after we changed the site almost totally, changed servers twice, changed operating systems, html to php, etc. etc. and we are finally recovering from it.<br /><br />We will be getting a free add pretty soon in a very large nursing magazine thanks to a partnership in the works with a major association, and are getting ready to launch a print ad.<br /><br />Now, we are working with the SEO specialist from Webposition Gold, to improve our search engine rankings.<br /><br />We just bought a ton of pens to send out to hospitals and other companies as well. Nurses ALWAYS need pens and seeing a pen lieing on the nurses station desk with www.ultimatenurse.com on it can't hurt. A quality pen is a pretty valuable tool to a nurse <img src="http://www.ubbdev.com/forum/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />.<br /><br />Anyway, the best suggestion I could probably make to you for increased traffic, AND ad revenue is this:<br /><br />Buy another copy of threads, give it away to a site that has good traffic but not a good forum, and have it use the same database. They get a quality forum, and it appears that there is instant participation, AND in return, they have to display your google adsense ads on the forum so you make money.<br /><br />Plus, you own the database so if they leave, they leave with an empty forum and user list. Therefore, you have the control, and once people start signing up, they pretty much have to continue with you...<br /><br />Then you are even more virtual than you were before (if that is possible) because site visitors can now discuss issues in real time with site users from other websites...<br /><br />I've done this with my nursing forum as you can see from the links below:<br /><br />http://www.ultimatenurse.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php<br />and<br />http://www.nurse-recruiter.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php<br />and<br />http://www.nurseserver.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php <br />there are 7 more in addition to those but you get the point.<br /><br />I'm also integrating an instant messenger solution only for nurses from www.interactiveni.com which will use the same user db. So all users have an IM solution that interacts with yahoo, aim, msn, icq, etc. and anyone who signs up for the IM solution will have a forum user/pass as well.<br /><br />I also have an pretty substantial email newsletter subscription...

I have a question shortbus: <br /> <br />How did you integrate the Photo Galleries (PhotoPost) across your different sites? I understand how to do have more than one site and forum access the same database, I'm doing that. That was easy enough because all the information that was important like site setting are in the config.inc.php file and each site can have a different config.inc.php, as long as the database settings are the same. <br /> <br />PhotoPost puts all that information in the the database, so there is only one copy of that information, so I have no idea how you integrated the Photo Galleries across the sites. I checked the url of a thumbnail on two different sites, and they both go to ultimatenurse.com, but I have no idea how you did that. Care to share? <br /> <br />BTW: Good idea about giving away an extra copy of threads. Are you actually "giving" it away, or just giving them permission to use it on their site?

Heck man, I don't know, Omegatron hooked me up. I do know that it has to be hosted on the same server because the images are hosted locally. The sites that aren't on my server don't have pp, or rp, although I'm hoping we can find a way around that as well...

Sounds good SB - but it would be even better if you could display different forums for each site <img src="http://www.ubbdev.com/forum/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> and perhaps just use the user table. As surely once you give them their 'own' forum they will want to control things add forums, not display forums that are not 100% relevant etc.<br /><br />If you want to include sites that are not hosted on your server - then why not set up forums.theirsite.co.uk on your server, whilst www.theirsite will remain on theirs - it will need a little tweaking with DNS, but it should work fine.

you can exclude forums from showing up on other peoples forums. I don't, but I'm pretty sure you can do it.<br /><br />I haven't had any problems from anyone in regards to control, as I made the terms very clear in the beginning and have been very open to any requests from other site owners.

another good thing to do is get alot of keywords on your page that has to do with anything and everthing with your site(even in the metafile) and get them on the search engines. do a search on Mudcon and now I come up first on all the search engines. also with my site I also entered it in the top 100 which it is #1 now. CK IT OUT HERE

<img src="http://www.ubbdev.com/forum/images/graemlins/BewareSpam.gif" alt="" /> <br /> <br />http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/biggest-web-design-mistakes-in-2004.html

DL- I responed to your spam post on the other thread. I have been a member here since 2003 and have been trying to understand all that is talked about on this site. I finally started to join in the community but I am still at a loss of what I am doing that is spamming. I have a personal website that dont sell nothing???