MESKOS Forum Development Blog

A Community is like a Beautiful Woman

Your forum community is just like a beautiful women, why? Keep reading.

Keeping her Interested.

To cut a good and long lasting relationship, you need to grab her attention and maintain her interest. This can be done by experimenting. You never know what is best for your community if you never test it out. Try new things, escape your comfort zone, have an open mind because who knows what reward it can bring. Just remember, don’t let your relationship go dull and stale.

Treat her well and you will be rewarded.

Everyone wants to be treated well, especially your women. She wants to be respected, listened to and appreciated. Same as your community, your forum needs an ongoing attention and your members also need to be respected and listened so they feel a sense of value within them selves.

Remember, if you don’t treat your women well, you will obviously see a breakdown in your relationship. Same as your forum, if you don’t treat your forum members and the community well for a period of time, it will come to a devastating conclusion.

Beauty must be seen to be appreciated.

There can be a women with the looks of an angel but if her beauty is not seen, then it’s wasted. Make sure your community looks great and that you have spent enough time advertising and spreading the word of your forum. Make sure your design is original and memorable, so your visitors admire your forum.

Beauty needs a personality.

Yes beauty is a bonus but without a wonderful personality, the relationship may become awkward or uncomfortable. Same as a forum, every community has their own unique personality (their own set of rules, their own ways of creating humor, their own ways of running a forum) - develop it, and it will differentiate your community from the competition and lure in new members. Being beautiful isn’t everything.

You won’t always get along.

Yes, arguments and disagreements are always evadable within a relationship. No matter how beautiful she is, it can not be avoided because everyone is different in their unique ways. This is normal in all relationships, same as an online community.

99% of forum owners find it difficult and slowly give up after not making much progress in recruiting new members and visitors. Don’t give up! It’s normal because all forums have to start from somewhere.

We also may have one or two arguments with members or staff, this is where you need to stop, think again and keep your cool. The continuous arguing will affect the relationship and your community.

Jealously.

Yes, this may have happened to you once in your forum development years. You’ve banned a member and they revenge by creating a similar forum (which usually fails) because their simply trying to annoy you or give you competition. Prepare for jealously, it’s only a small part of your forum history.

Time for your input.

Like always, please leave your thoughts and opinions on this article by leaving a comment.

Sorry but i’m a male and i based the analogy on a a beautiful woman. Hope it’s understandable.

Tags: forums, women

Why making Forums Private is a Bad Idea.

Private forums take place on every forum online. They are most common in hiding staff rooms, so administrators and moderators can have exclusive (behind the scene) discussions about the forum, without members peering and leaking out information. This is how it should be.

Some forum owners, hide all their forums from visitors and only allow access to them when a member registers (or has an activated account). The only types of forums which should have their whole forum private are, family forums, personal forums, business forums etc. Why? Because they are not trying to gain public members but rather contact their clients/friends. If you are trying to gain members for your community, and your target is forum growth, your forum should be public.

Here are 3 reasons on how privatising your forum will affect your forum success.

If i can’t see what i’m joining for, why should i bother?

Some people decide to turn their forums on private to maximize registration rates. Example: they will want to register, so that they can see what the community is like. But generally, this stratergy will backfire and result in the total opposite.

Members usually decide to register because they see the content or a discussion which they want to reply to (interact with). So remember, keep your forum opened to the public. Allow them to read your discussions, if they think its worth it, then you have scored a new dedicated member. But if you force visitors to register just to view those discussions, more than likely, they will turn away and never return.

Hiding something from us? I’ll pass.

To some visitors, the reason why forums are set to private is because of illegal activity (trading music, copyrighted programs, softwares etc) or other activities which they don’t want the public to see. Especially those music and movie forums which require registering before gaining access to visit the forums.

This is another reason why setting forums to private may affect your forum growth. It will impact on your registration rate as members don’t wish to take any risk in joining the forum because they ‘assume’ there might be suspicious activity going on behind the scene which in most cases isn’t true. The bottom line is, visitors may have misinterpretations on your forum.

Search Engines can’t Index you!

For any community that is really looking to grow, this is reason enough. Search Engines provide large amounts of traffic for forums. Turn your forum public so it allows search engines to view your content and also index it into their search engine.

Every topic made on your forum is a potential advertiser. If your forum is set to public, each topic is indexed within a search engine. (Eg. Google). For example: If you made a topic about ‘Photo Effect Tutorial(s)’ and someone searched those keywords in Google, they may hit your result and view your forum. Depending on the quality of your content and if they like what they see, you may have scored a new member. Just remember, let those search engine spiders crawl your forum and not close the door on them.

If search engines can’t index your content, you are cutting off a potentially big source of traffic and limiting yourself in a truly unnecessary way.

Just remember, there are many negatives towards turning your forum private. It affects your registration rates significantly, is that what your aiming to do?

© MESKOS Forum Development Blog 2008
Reading Your Way to Success.
Building a Successful Forum.

Tags: forums, private, successful forum

Why Advertising Forums Don’t Work.

Why Advertising Forums Don’t Work.
“Free Advertising Forums” Oh my, i must join!

There are uncountable amounts of forums dedicated to pure advertising services on the internet at the moment. I have taken some time to develop some points in which why these Free Advertising forums do not work.

1. “Our Members are Your Members” - As you see, many of these free advertisement forums say that their members are yours because once you submit your advert, they will join your board. Wrong! Think for yourself, when you join an advert. forum, do you actually take the time to check other peoples advertisements? No (In most cases), you simply register, post a specific number of posts to meet their requirements, submit your advert. and leave and never visit that forum again. This theory also applies to 70%-80%+ of the other members of the forum (my estimate).
2. The Requirements for Advertising - Most of these free advertisement forums require you to post 10 non-spam posts etc. They say its a requirement but really its a necessity for their forum to survive. If visitors registered just to advertise their website/forum, the forum would have no activity what so ever. And while you spend so much time and effort to meet their requirements, believe me, from my past experiences, you will not gain any more than 10 dedicated clicks (MAX). I would suggest you to rather spend the time on signature advertising on active and related forums. Visit my Effective Signature Advertising guide for more information.
3. Link Back to us, or we Decline! - So much for the FREE Advertising forum. Shouldn’t an advertising forum benefit your forum? not decrease the traffic and enforcing a link-back to them? Especially those services which require an affiliate button, this just damages the forums image. And if the forum requires their link to be in the footer etc, this means their link is displayed on every page while yours is buried within sub-forums on their board.

If the advertising forum you visit doesn’t comply with the 3 points i stated, then you have joined a true dedicated free promotion forum but if the advertising forum you visit complies with them, i would recommend you to spend your time wisely.

This is just a small personal rant on those free advertising forums.

Written by
Michael. W
© MESKOS Forum Development Blog 2008
Redistribution of this article will be violating copyright laws.
Please contact me if you would like this doc. submitted to your forum/website.

Tags: advertising, forums, free