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The Ministry of Rum forum

22 Sep

Hello everyone,

I know it’s been a while since I posted a review in my Successful Forum Owners section. I currently have two sites to review and post, here is the first one.

The Ministry of Rum forums began as a link to a blank vBulletin forum in March 2007 and quickly grew to a hundred active users, then two hundred and today more than 4000 members receive monthly updates about upcoming rum related events. Though the Rum Lovers Forums are free and contain no advertising, Edward Hamilton is negotiating with several companies for Sponsored Forums that would be customized for their use after polling the forum community. Since the Rum Lovers Forums have established themselves as the most credible information source on new and old rum offerings, the members have endorsed features that allow them to communicate directly with the people who produce the rum they love.

The barometer of success has many scales. One important metric is the number of posts per thread, an indicator of the community involvement in the discussion. At just under 9 posts/thread as the forum approaches 40,000 posts, Ed Hamilton feels the Rum Lovers forums have found their mark in the community.

While Ed doesn’t concern himself with SEO, the Ministry of Rum site has been on the top half of the first page on Google searches for ‘RUM’ for more than a few years, he is more proud of the fact that he has banned only four people, one twice, for abusing the forums. Though he admits that new lurkers are often intimidated by the volume and knowledge of many forum members, the overall tone has been to welcome new members and help them discover their newest favorite rum.

Adding a community dynamic to the Ministry of Rum website has significantly increased the calls for consulting, paid speaking engagements and brand endorsement over the last three years.

Edward Hamilton


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Starting a Free Blogging Network

28 Jul

When I first heard that the 3rd version of WordPress was going to have the option to run the site like WordPressMU use to, I was very excited. I’ve had some experience with networking blogs on one of my first URL’s, Sheley.org had WordPressMU on it for a while. It’s where my original Brandon Sheley blog started, as well as, a blog for wife and a baby site for the family. I also ran dozens of WordPress sites to show off the free WP styles I was giving away at the time. I eventually shut that script down and went straight to WP for those sites, merged some info together and dropped WPMU altogether.

I wanted to start a network back up but had to make sure I had a good URL. I picked up AlienSoup.com from a forum purchase and merged all their forums and members into General-Forums. This is a 10 year old domain and it’s defiantly brand-able, I’m going to give it a new life as a free blogging platform. We already have a few forum members that have picked up their own personal URL and I see some are already getting indexed. I’m going to do everything I can to get all new blogs indexed, the AlienSoup domain already have 10 years of backlinks, I will of course be adding to those in the next few months. I’ve already added a few of my favorite plug-ins, you’re more then welcome to add whatever ones you like through your control panel. I’m going to be scouting some nice themes to add soon, I believe you can also add your own styles through the control panel as well. It’s a pretty nice setup to be honest, I’ve always been a big fan of WordPress and what you can do with it. I’m looking forward to building this network and watching it develop.

If you know of a great plug-in for 3.x that works particularly well with the network feature, please comment and let me know. One of the things I’d like to do is be able to get one RSS feed of all the forums and sites so I could promote that to help get every new post indexed. Another thing I’ll be looking deeply in is social media, I have a working retweet button on all the blogs, I’d like to get a Facebook “like” badge also. I have the wp-greet box enabled on all blogs, this will help with return traffic.

This will be a long project and I don’t expect it to take off overnight, but it’s something I’m not going to give up on. It will be a success sooner rather than later.

 
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Posted in Reviews, Websites

 

How to run a successful state niche forum

14 Dec

Over the past 2 or 3 years I’ve had the pleasure of watching Chase Speers excel with his state specific forums. He’s won a number of awards for his flagship forum (TalkDelaware.com) including BOTM on my old forum “vBSetup” as well as on vBulletin.com & vBulletin.org. TalkDelaware also won best website in Delaware for 2007 beating out the local newspaper! Chase has a state forum for Pennsylvania called TalkPA.net which has also won a few awards and honorable mentions.

Chase started chatting on forums about 5 years ago on a cell phone forum. He enjoyed it so much; he soon offered his help moderating the forums and became good friends with the owner Steve. That forum eventually was sold. Chase & Steve started up a few more forums, but Chase wanted full ownership of a forum, just had to think of a good topic. That’s where TalkDelaware comes into play, there is an “official” Delaware website that Chase was part of, but it didn’t seem like management had a full understanding of what could be done with their forums. Chase was determined to make a better forum for the state of Delaware, and that’s exactly what he did.

TalkDelawareThe official Delaware site was full of spam, trolls and just about every nightmare we as forum owners can think of. It was full of rude people who didn’t care who they pissed off and weren’t afraid to let their voice be heard. Chase was optimistic about the good people on this forum, and that’s who he would target when setting up his own forum. Chase became a very active user on that forum helping out everyone he could, all the time having his new Delaware forum linked to from his signature and maybe in some of the post as well. This can be a long process, but will get you quality users over time and in some cases; they will add your forum link in their sigs, thus recruiting more users. The only thing I would caution you about using this method, if you don’t want to get labeled as a spammer or possibly kicked of the forum you’re recruiting from, so test the waters and see what you can get away with.helpful_tips_banner
If you look at the TalkDelaware forum, you’ll notice a custom style that matches icons seen throughout the state. This is the same on TalkPA as well, and I think it was a vital decision in his forum being successful. You want to let your members feel comfortable, and what’s a better way than tying in some of the great historical points of your state, into your forums. Read the rest of this entry »


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