- Joined
- Oct 30, 2007
- Thread Starter
- #21
Thank you for spending time to write me such a long and informative post.
You are the third person telling me to use Wordpress after I already built the silly looking homepage with the SiteBuilder tool from Hostgator.
I fully intend to follow that suggestion. As the matter of fact, I already installed Wordpress on a testing page through Quick Install tool from Hostgator, but I am still trying to figure out how to customize it. I am a total noob on that.
I am actually negotiating with two people to build the site and customize the forum for me, since I lack of the necessary skills to do a good job myself.
My own knowledge about pets is actually only specialized in freshwater tropical fish. Yes, I thought about to have a fish only forum, but the thought of there are a whole lot more dogs and cats owners than fish owners made me to include other pets too...with the hope of being able to gain more members because of the wider range of targeted audience.
I am fully aware of the competitors. Mostly because I am also members on multiple very successful fish forums. One of them have nothing but a forum and a homepage but with nearly 80k members. The most successful one I've been to have well over 100k members.
The idea of having more than just one category of pets might (I hope at least lol) avoid direct competition with any single one of them.
It is hard to get even support from friends. I've been telling them to join and create some activities for me by posting quality content, so far I got only total 14 posts from all my real friends.
I created Facebook page for it.
I created twitter account for it.
I also answer questions on Yahoo answers under related categories with back links to my forum left and right.
None seem to be working lol.
I've been reading lots of materials online about how to start a forum, it is all easier say than done. Somewhere I read that I need at least 20 active members to post quality posts daily to be able to attract random visitors to sign up. I am no where near there. Where am I going to get 20 active members to post daily without spamming? lol
I really have only 3 active members who visit the forum daily.
Those people who came through back links only read the one related thread and just leave without leaving a comment, even though I know they haven't learned anything close to what they think they know and they need to be disciplined further lol.
Ok, I think I have solved the problem with bots. After I installed a plugin, I am not getting 3~4 bots a day now. I only got one person posting an ads on my forum yesterday and I deleted it with a warning to him. Should I ban such person without warning?
Right now, what I really need is to have someone help me complete the site and the remodeling of the forum.
Then at least the appearance of the forum would be more appeal, and I can focus on the marketing instead of worrying multiple things at the same time.
You are the third person telling me to use Wordpress after I already built the silly looking homepage with the SiteBuilder tool from Hostgator.
I fully intend to follow that suggestion. As the matter of fact, I already installed Wordpress on a testing page through Quick Install tool from Hostgator, but I am still trying to figure out how to customize it. I am a total noob on that.
I am actually negotiating with two people to build the site and customize the forum for me, since I lack of the necessary skills to do a good job myself.
My own knowledge about pets is actually only specialized in freshwater tropical fish. Yes, I thought about to have a fish only forum, but the thought of there are a whole lot more dogs and cats owners than fish owners made me to include other pets too...with the hope of being able to gain more members because of the wider range of targeted audience.
I am fully aware of the competitors. Mostly because I am also members on multiple very successful fish forums. One of them have nothing but a forum and a homepage but with nearly 80k members. The most successful one I've been to have well over 100k members.
The idea of having more than just one category of pets might (I hope at least lol) avoid direct competition with any single one of them.
It is hard to get even support from friends. I've been telling them to join and create some activities for me by posting quality content, so far I got only total 14 posts from all my real friends.
I created Facebook page for it.
I created twitter account for it.
I also answer questions on Yahoo answers under related categories with back links to my forum left and right.
None seem to be working lol.
I've been reading lots of materials online about how to start a forum, it is all easier say than done. Somewhere I read that I need at least 20 active members to post quality posts daily to be able to attract random visitors to sign up. I am no where near there. Where am I going to get 20 active members to post daily without spamming? lol
I really have only 3 active members who visit the forum daily.
Those people who came through back links only read the one related thread and just leave without leaving a comment, even though I know they haven't learned anything close to what they think they know and they need to be disciplined further lol.
Ok, I think I have solved the problem with bots. After I installed a plugin, I am not getting 3~4 bots a day now. I only got one person posting an ads on my forum yesterday and I deleted it with a warning to him. Should I ban such person without warning?
Right now, what I really need is to have someone help me complete the site and the remodeling of the forum.
Then at least the appearance of the forum would be more appeal, and I can focus on the marketing instead of worrying multiple things at the same time.
To be more helpful than my last post, here are some tips about what I think it takes. Just my opinion for whatever its worth.
- Someone uniquely motivated which inspires others to come together. Take KPC forums for instance, it isn't terribly active, but the activity it does have was built from Kingpin going to extraordinary lengths in order to establish street cred as a leader in the field. He then also built a business and launched the forum in support of that... It gets a decent amount of activity for a new startup forum in a heavily saturated market like computer hardware.
- A unique niche in the market. There are tons of computer hardware sites most people don't care about. The people who care about KPC only care because there isn't any other site really like that for extreme cooling, with products as well as extreme gurus hanging out there.
- Investment. In order for people to take your site seriously, you need to invest and for that investment to be demonstrated to your audience. One important way to do this is through solid site design - whether simple or elaborate, it should look professional to inspire the belief in people that your site is worth investing in. People's time is an investment, they will spend it in the way they think is most worthwhile. Your friends are willing to invest in things because they are your friends, to attract strangers they have to perceive value and investment by others.
- Bots will always be a challenge. We average about 60 registrations a day (real people), we average over 500 bot registration attempts a day, we average 3-5 banned spammers a day who get past our safeguards and actually register successfully and get handled by moderators (these are real people, we are blocking 100% of automated bots). You need to install plugins, or develop plugins that work with the stopforumspam API. Custom developed anti-spam solutions are an important measure, anything standard or in wide deployment will be routinely beaten by the bots - they've been learning longer than you have.
Overclockers started as the first overclocking site more or less. I need an old-timer to chime in, but we started in 98, around the same time as hardocp and anandtech, and I don't know who else goes back that far - I know that almost none of our competitors go that far. When you hit a market before it actually exists, you don't have much competition, and chances are people looking to find out about the topic are going to end up on your site. That is how people got to overclockers... Then we got coverage in publications and legitimate media, as others took note of the growth, and we got more people.
Overclockers was designed well for its time, that old grey site looked old ten years later, but when it was first made it was leading edge. It had uniquely motivated people running it - Joe, Ed, and Skip had a passion for the topic, and they quickly built a following of other nuts and bolts guys who came together to talk about the topic. They created a unique niche, and they dominated it. HardOCP went the gamer route and dominated that, we went the enthusiast route and dominated that - other sites began springing out of the woodwork and doing similar things, many of them grew into successful sites as well. Overclockers was one of less than a handful of sites which started a community that reaches across thousands of enthusiast sites currently.
Skip spent a lot of money keeping the servers running and had his own knowledge to build and operate the forum. Joe made a lot of money on banner advertising, as money was just falling out of the sky around when this site launched - you just needed a bucket to catch it all. He hired Ed to write to supplement his own content and that helped support the flow of new content every day, which keeps readers coming back, and keeps advertisers paying. He also had a unique approach in that he actively worked with the community early on and published amateur articles... There weren't many sites like it at the time.
I hope that helps.
More specifically, first my advice is improve your site. You built yours using basekit, which is no good - those sorts of solutions are a scam for people that don't know better. They can serve a certain purpose, but they aren't good. You should use wordpress or a similar CMS for your site. Three reasons:
1. It makes it easier to update content, rather than spending time maintaining the codebase of your site.
2. There are a lot of free themes for wordpress, and a lot of people who would create a theme custom for you for relatively cheap. This will make your site easier to operate, and it will make it more attractive to visitors.
3. SEO is critical to getting visitors and new members. Most CMS come with decent structure for SEO, and offer plugins to improve SEO easily. As you learn more, you can leverage this better which is how you increase the notability and reputation of your site.
Second, my advice is know your competitors. What are leaders in the general pets site niche doing. You need to know what they are doing, and compare it to what you are essentially doing. If you can't compete with them at what they are doing, you need to do something different - focus on where you can win. Be realistic. You have to offer something no one else does, or something better than anyone else does - if you can't do that, your site will fail or blend in with other lame sites. You can be similar, but you have to have something special... Think of local pizza shops. There are probably a half dozen or more within 30 minutes of your house. Those that stay in business do something special.
Third, is have a monetization strategy. You may not be out to make money, but running a successful site costs money. For design stuff, for hosting, for improvements... For instance, if you run a site that makes 50 grand a year, you can quit your job and spend all day every day working on it, and you will make it better if you are smart and working hard. But small scale, even if you just make 1000 a year, thats still the site supporting itself a bit and a little bit of investment you can use to improve the site over time.
Fourth, your site focus is working against you. A general pet site about everything is too generic. It is impossible to compete well in that focus, its like going up against walmart - you aren't going to beat them at their business model. But maybe you could specialize better than they can, if you focus on a certain product or subset of what they do. In your case, that would be a specific breed, or specific animal, or some special twist that differentiates you.
Finally, I'm not criticizing anything you've done. Building and running a site is a learning process, and its hard to do well - plenty of people doing it, few sites stand out from the crowd.
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