When I first heard that the 3^rd 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.

One effective way of promoting a forum is with posting contest. I’ve ran a few in the past years, but the one I’ll talk about today is the first for my new General Forums. In the past it was pretty easy to find sponsorship for the contest. My old forum targeted a niche, I actually had sponsors in back-order, just waiting for us to finish one contest and start another. It wasn’t so easy for this contest, but we’re still young (3 months old) it’ll get better as time passes.

I purchased a small site today, and will merge that this weekend. After I get that imported, I’ll send out an email to everyone and work on the newsletter that will be sent out in another week or so.

This is going to be a rather short post, just wanted to get a few links out to the contest. I’ve had so much go on lately and have thought about putting it down in a blog post several times, but never get around to it when I’m in front of the computer. I’m going post pics and use my tumblr account as a mini blog, I’ll see if I can tie it into a widget or something on this blog. I didn’t realize this, but I’ve had that account for 2 years! Time sure fly’s..lol

What are some of the ideas you have for promoting your forums, we’re like to hear them?

How do you brand yourself or your business, where do you stop? I’ll list off some of the ways I’ve continued to build my brand, and some things you can do to build your personal brand.

As some of you know, I recently sold a website dedicated to helping vBulletin admins. On that forum I had two sections, one that listed off all the clients I had worked with (that approved to be mentioned) & one that listed several of the testimonials from those clients. At the time of selling that forum I had worked on over 300 vBulletin sites. This was over a 3-year span & many of those admins would need repeat work (vB upgrades, new sites etc..). When I sold the site I built a new “vBulletin Services” page on this blog. Right around that same time that I sold the site, I picked up a great job with the state – I’m still very happy employed and loving it. I knew that I wouldn’t be taking on as many jobs as before, so promoting the services back on this blog wasn’t a priority.

I’m starting to clear up some time and thought I might as well take care of this so I can mark it off my list. I’m going to re-post all the clients I had worked with, a general outline of what I did and a link/screenshot to their site. I’ll setup a category for my clients and testimonials. I also have the option with the current style to display 9 featured client sites. I think it says something about webhosting right now, and you might see the screenshots displayed across the top, those will be changed soon, I’m hoping to have everything transferred over by the end of this next week. I may not end up using this green style you see, I want to have an option to show featured post on the home page, like my IPB vs vBulletin post should be on the front, it was getting a lot of comments, as well as a few others that have a high comment count.

So this is how I’ll continue to build my brand, by showing the work I’ve done and what my clients say about me. In the 3+ years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never had an upset customer with problems that we couldn’t resolve. Usually it’s a communication error, and that’s one of the reasons I like to talk on the phone with clients, but I request all site requirements done via email. That way I have a solid copy and know exactly what a client wants. It’s best to be clear and concise and keep good documentation of the work at hand.

In short, all my subscribers will get a few updates with a dozen or so post it in, I’ll try to get through them as fast as possible so it’s not so annoying for the subscribers.

Thanks as always for all the support!

This last weekend I had the pleasure of merging one of the first vBulletin forums that I can remember looking at when I started switching from phpBB to vB. AlienSoup.com had been around for 10 years before I purchased it and merged it with General-Forums. I’m very appreciative to have the chance and opportunity to make this happen.

As some of you may know, I’ve purchased 4 or 5 forums and already have merged them with my General Forum. I’m always on the lookout for the next great deal and awesome content to add to our forum. Since our AlienSoup merger, I’ve had a few people contact me, one person has 2 medium size gaming forums that I might purchase, another guy had a great NBA forum, but it was well out of my price range, although it would have been great to add it.

I made a Twitter account for the forum called @GeneralForums, I’ll use this account to post site updates as well as search for our next merger. I have my personal account (@BrandonSheley) which had close to 20,000 followers before I started unfollowing 10,000 users that post spammy links or don’t interact the way Twitter was designed. I’ll build it back up once all the spam is removed and I have a little wiggle room to add great users all over the world.

Now that the General-Forums has some great content, I can focus on building links to the new categories, as well as my article marketing that I was doing before the whole ThinkBigTopeka movement started! I’ll get back in the routine of getting a new blog post up at least once a week, if not twice. I loved the interaction that I was building on the blogs. Your comments are what keeps me going and with the latest PR update, they help you just as much as they help me.

This brings me to another point before I go. I will be looking for sponsors that would like to get their name out in our first forum contest. I’ve ran 3 month long posting contest in the past and they’ve been a HUGE success, I’m looking forward to our first contest on General Forums.

Thank you everyone for sticking with this blog while I’ve been busy! I will not disappoint you for your attentiveness, and will do what I can to reward you or any new subscribers that come along.

If you haven’t been following us, we started ThinkbigTopeka in February and it’s really been a huge success! We have over 16,000 members in our facebook group and close to 1,000 in our facebook page. We started off as a group to lure Google to come to Topeka, but we’re not stopping there. We’re going to be a public forum for positive discussing in Topeka. Something we had started TransformTopeka for but things got out of hand. We’re hoping for better results with ThinkBigTopeka.

I think we’re off to a good start, check out google.com for results.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb80NjqTZNg

Thanks again for everyone support, we couldn’t have done this without your support Topeka!

Check out google’s official blog for more info.

I just helped with an hour of updates for GameKiller.

• updated and optimized vBulletin
• updated and optimized vbseo

The best cost effective way to vbulletin-services/” target=”_blank”>promote your business through ads is the online marketing. High search engine ranking can be achieved only be effective strategies of SEO writing. Almost all the businesses want to get a position for their website in the some first pages of search engines. So, there is need for some effective strategies to be followed while writing SEO content. A content that is keyword rich and informative can get better ranking in the search engines.

Professional SEO content writer has to make and follow some effective strategies to write the content, in order to enable it to get high ranking in search engines. The keyword should be used in the URLs, main headings, sub headings and title tags. Getting a professional SEO writer is not difficult. Online businesses will be no more difficult for you if you find a reliable and experienced SEO writing service provider. The efficient and professional SEO writer combines the methods of keyword analysis, usability analysis, website maintenance, sound navigation, promotion, search engine ranking report etc for optimization.

An effective strategy for better ranking in search engines is the identification of the keywords that are searched recently by the buyers of the product type you are going to sell online. Keyword suggestion tool are available online to help you getting the most searched keywords. Look for synonyms too while searching for the proper keyword because you have to avoid using he keyword excessively. You can do so by using synonyms of the keywords that have the probability to be used by the visitors. Online reader will not stay on your website if the content is boring.

There are a lot of things to be considered when you are building your site to get maximize search engine ranking. Best way to start is to consider yourself as reader and think what you would like to read in the relevant content and what would you type to search your desired product or service. You can also take idea by searching the websites that are ranked in the first pages of Google. Explore what keywords have they used and with what intensity and tactics. Keywords are important definitely but remember you are putting content online for the people to read it for information about your product. If they get bored and don’t like it they won’t return to it. So, remember that there is a lot f difference in what the people like to read and what is required to get maximum ranking in the search engines.

Your strategy for effective SEO content should be to convince your readers about the opinions and facts of the specific product. You can do that by providing them user friendly content. An original and informative content keeps users to come back to your website and the web traffic increases as a result. An effective SEO writing will than convert the readers into the buyers of your product and your profit will increase as a result.

The Internal Linking is the internal links, which inter- link the different pages of your website. They help you to go from one topic to another easily and the most important part is that you have complete control over these links

TunedTech is a really sharp looking forum, a great example of what you can do with vBulletin.

• optimized vbulletin
• optimized vbseo

We want the Google Experiment in Topeka

I’ve been helping with a cause here in Topeka Kansas. We’re trying to get Google to lay their fiber network all throughout our city. Google has announced that they are going to lay 1Gbps fiber line in some test cities. This will be 1 Gigabit of download directly to your home; you can use Google as your IPS of stick with who you have now in your area. If you have a second, I would greatly appreciate it if you would nominate Topeka Kansas. We have a website up and a Facebook group of 6500 members as of this posting. We only started this a week ago, the support has been outstanding. You can submit videos; I’ll include a few for you to check out.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVBxdrC1KIE

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZR6DRqSzY4

This is the nomination form for google, pass the words to your friends and help us help Topeka.

We’ve also had some outstanding media coverage, and we have a flash mob planned for this week. It’s going to be an exciting month if we get it or not. Google is taking nominations until March 26th.

It is very easy to conceptualize and create your own website in any way you can imagine. But, it is equally difficult to optimize it for SEO and get it to the top rankings in the search engines. There are so many small things and details, which you have to consider like the structure of your website, the content, the unique and general keywords, the headings, the title tags and the Meta tags, the anchor texts and the links.

When you are optimizing your site for the search engines, you have to do many things, which are repetitive in nature. These SEO tools make it easier for us to perform these tasks.

There are many other advantages of using the SEO tools like:

• They save your time, as they are able to perform the tasks within minutes.
• They make your optimization convenient as they automate the SEO at every step, thus making your optimization better organized and more efficient.
• They use proven techniques, which give good results and hence you don’t waste time in using ineffective methods.
• They allow you to multitask, that way you can perform various tasks simultaneously.
• They allow you to analyze all the data.
• They can even work automatically.

Your work history is automatically saved, as the SEO tool collects and archives the information and other changes that you have made, so that you can see at a later stage, if you have made any mistakes. The most important point being that they are automatically adjusted according to the needs if the SEO environment changes.

Now that we are aware of the benefits of the SEO tools, lets us talk about the different types of SEO tools. Depending upon the type of work they are able to perform the SEO tools can be classified as:

Keyword Discovery Tools, which are important to find the keywords that your site needs.

Some of the popular keyword discovery tools are:

• Google Adwords External Tool is very relevant as it gives the actual number of the searches a keyword has generated per month.
• AdCenter Keyword Group Detection, which is a Microsoft’s tool that helps in analyzing the words or phrases.
• Term Extractor extracts the keywords form any given URL.
• Keyword Volume Tools give you an estimate on how many clicks and search traffic has a particular keyword generated. Some of the popular keyword volume tools are:

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool uses the word tracker’s API to get an estimate on the volume generated by the keywords.

Keyword Density Tools help in analyzing how much the keyword is targeted in the specific webpage. The most popular keyword density tool is—

Term Target Tool, which takes the URL and the keyword and tells you how much you have scored.

Backlink Tracker Tools keep track of how many sites are linking to your site. Some of the backlink tracker tools are:

Yahoo “linkdomain:” query prepend, where by typing the link and the domain name, you are able to get the number of links that domain has.

Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools, You’ll be able to see every backlink to your site if you submit a sitemap.

Site Explorer Tool is the Yahoo’s backlink tracker tool, which keeps and eye on both the inbound links and the outbound links.

Twitter is a simple social micro blogging site. The main page on Twitter has only one message box which you can use to post your tweets. Apart from that you have the followers list and profile tweets of your followers and those whom you follow. On second thought you may be wondering how such a simple site can be called revolutionary! Twitter might be simple. However, there are many third party Twitter applications that are making Twitter much more interesting and integrated.

Tweet Deck is the most famous Twitter third party application. Tweet Deck calls itself “a simple and fast way to experience Twitter.”  It allows you to tweet from your phone. Tweet Deck allows you to integrate many of your other social networking sites at one place. The web is so complex and we do so many things that we do not have the time everyday to see what is happening everywhere. Tweet Deck solves that problem by integrating all your social sites at one browser. You will get to see in a snapshot, which sites are updated and where the action is. Moreover, Tweet Deck organizes the tweets in directory formats which allow you to add to your list, the tweeters who share the same interest as you, much faster! Apart from that, Tweet Deck shows you the most popular tweet lists as well.

Group Tweet is another third party application of Twitter which is very useful. You may have many different interest and ay want to run your campaign or post issues based on certain topics. Maintain group on Twitter and use activate that group on Group Tweet to send messages to relevant groups. This way, the tweet will only be viewed by the people on that particular group list. Group Tweet helps businesses, classrooms, friends of different interest groups or projects to send private messages to one another without tweeting to the entire list of followers.

Digsby is as revolutionary as Twitter itself. Tweet Deck allows the integration of social networking sites. Digsby takes it one step further and allows you to integrate your email and chat accounts as well; Hotmail, Yahoo, AIM, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many more applications are brought together by Digsby on one single platform!

Tweetpic and Bubble Tweet, allows Twitter users to share pictures and videos respectively. Twitter was supposed to be a simple 140 character text social micro blogging site! Tweetpic and Bubble Tweet have brought Twitter to another level and attracted many more users to tweet with integrating pictures and videos in the tweet!

There are many more third party Twitter applications on the web. Via trial and error, you will be able to find some applications that you can use to integrate with your Twitter account get more mileage on your Internet marketing activities.

Let’s face it, I’m addicted to vBulletin (3.8)

I couldn’t stay away from the backend of a vBulletin forum for long. With the vBulletin Services that I offer, it’s very helpful to have a site setup to tweak  settings. The dev server wasn’t cutting it and I’m not really fond of vBulletin 4.0.

I’ve always said I wouldn’t start a vBulletin forum without vBSEO, so when a pair came up for sale at a decent price, I had to snag them up. So now I had the script, now what type of forum should I run? Well I’m not interested in another webmaster type forum, I’ve thought about starting several different niche forums but I defiantly don’t have time to manage all that, so I’ve decided to try a “general forums” type forum. Finally it was on to search for a domain; I scanned all over the webmaster forums trying to find a short brand-able .com but wasn’t having any luck. The domain I found has a hyphen it in which I’ve never been fond of, but I think I found a pretty good one considering the site I’ll be running.

I picked up www.General-Forums.com from godaddy.

My plans for this forum are to actually merge several smaller forums into it. I’ve already picked up a small database that has been imported. I’ve put a few bids down on some at digitalpoint, if you know of a quality (no warez or spam) database and/or site, please contact me and send me a link to the auction page.

I’ve been blessed enough that a few people that saw me tweeting about this have offered to help out! I truly have great friends and appreciate every one of you!! If you would like to help than what I would suggest is to register on the forum and shoot me a PM or email and I’ll set you up in the contributors group so you can see the forums as we piece together all the databases.

Once I have a good selection of forums & content put together (shooting for 500K post) and well organized, I’ll open everything up for spiders, guest, and open up public posting for registered users. I’ll than put together an email newsletter to blast out to all the members of the forum. This will be a reminder for everyone across what may be upwards of 20+ sites/databases.

I’m looking forward to seeing this site grow as much as you are.

Do you think it’s wise to start general forums? Would you ever start a forum on such a broad range of topics?

Advantages and disadvantages of using Twitter for Internet Marketing

Twitter is a great tool. There are millions of people who are tweeting this very moment and the phenomenon is not going to end anytime soon. The idea of tweeting “What are you doing right now” has caught on so well that we see even President Barack Obama on Twitter! Twitter is here to stay, at least for a while till something much simpler than Twitter comes on the net.

As such, should you get on the bandwagon and tweet your Internet marketing collateral online? Twitter is a great business platform and it helps the consumers as much as it helps the businesses. However, just like any other thing, Twitter has its good points and bad points. Using Twitter for business purposes, hence, has its advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages of Twitter

Your Internet marketing can be done free of cost if you use Twitter wisely. Your target market is out there for you to seek and understand. Understand from their tweets, their passion and interests. Do your research on your target market by following the tweets of your target market for better understanding. Identify the strategies used by your competitors by following their tweets as well.

Twitter allows you to network efficiently and with large groups of people. Twitter and its third party applications allow you to segregate and interact with your target markets effectively. You can direct your Internet marketing campaigns at relevant groups efficiently by using Twitter

Twitter allows you to communicate directly with your target market instantly. Normally, the process of communication takes time. For example, if you have a Website, the communication would be via polls, which are not personal or though contact forms which are time consuming and impersonal as well. With twitter, you can expect instant communication with your target market. You may have just posted a tweet, but a reply from your target market could come in an instant as well. Twitter helps you to gather real time intelligence from your very own target market as well as obtain valuable feedback. The speed of communication is just fantastic with Twitter. Moreover, your near approach helps to builds lasting relationship as you will come across as a company that cares for its consumers instead of just hard selling.

Disadvantages of Twitter

Twitter is the number one site for spammers. You will have to filter and weed out spammers from your lists from time to time, if you want to have a good gauge of your target market. Otherwise, the followers total will be an inflated number which will not help in your Internet marketing campaigns. Filtering spam tweets is a lot of hard work. Other means of Internet marketing may seem feasible in the long run.

Twitter is addictive. It is very easy to get distracted as you join in the conversations or receive tweets outside your business interests. You will have to strike a balance with getting friendly with your followers and meeting your Internet marketing objectives

In conclusion, how you want to use Twitter is up to you. Like any other means of communication, Twitter has its own advantages and disadvantages. Advantages far outweigh disadvantages. Hence, use Twitter for your Internet marketing needs and ensure that Twitter is used sparingly. Your tweets can be classified as spam as well, if you are just posting tweets with inks and not connecting with your followers.

When a new online business is starting up, their main issue usually falls at marketing, the problem that is usually faced with both new and existing business marketing is the fact that they are not getting the number of sales or online traffic that they desire, a solution to this problem may include consulting with a search engine optimization company.

What the these business owners need to know is that marketing is not just putting out a few ads and hoping for the best, but rather a process that involves lots of strategies and planning. Although marketing is a process, it does not have to be complicated; you would simply have to set a goal and then make a plan with strategies on how to achieve them, if you have a website, this can be done with the aid of a search engine optimization consultant.vbulletin-services/” target=”_blank”>

Depending on the type of product and / or service that you offer, you may want to get the services of a search engine optimization company who will help you to select the correct keywords and implement them in the correct places on your webpage. The aim of this will be to increase traffic to your website and in turn increase your sales and revenue.  If you are not clear as to what a search engine optimization service can do for you, simply ask your search engine optimization consultant to give you an overview, but all you need to know is that persons search for products on services on the web by entering certain words that they think will give them a list of websites that offer the type of product or service that they are looking for.

These are called keywords or key phrases; this is what leads a prospective customer to a website, as the search engine will return a result page with a list of websites that matches the keywords that were entered for the search. It is therefore imperative that your website has the correct keywords necessary to ensure that your webpage is among the results lists. Any professional search engine company that you choose to hire will already know how to perform a search engine optimization on your web pages to get more traffic to your website, and not just random traffic, but traffic that will lead to optimized sales and a better ROI.

Another simple and inexpensive way to get your business out there is to utilise the many social networks on the web, you can start by creating your own blog or forum which will talk about your company’s products or services, customers can leave comments and prospective customers can ask questions.

While advertising is always a good strategy, try to add other forms of promotion in the mix and if you company is an online company, get yourself a search engine optimisation package  from a search engine optimization company, all these put together will promote customer growth and sales.

When an online company makes the decision to get a vbulletin-services/” target=”_blank”>professional SEO service, the aim is to have more traffic coming to their website from the implementation of a good search engine optimization service. Not only will they have a higher traffic rate, but they will also have that traffic being converted into customers and thus increasing revenue. Search engine optimization services and the use of search engine optimization company can significantly aid a business that is looking to market their online company. As a matter of fact search engine optimization is become essential as most business owners for these online companies do not know how to make there web pages keyword and content friendly so that they have a good ranking in search engines and generate traffic.

There are many companies that extend a search engine optimization service and are on high demand by online companies who wish to make there website and company do better. There will be lots of people who claim that they can help to optimize a web-page, but as a online company owner, you must be wary and vigilant in your search for a search engine optimization company, because some of them will try to incorporate some forms of black hat methods that may work for a brief period and then result in your website being penalized or worse; banned. You must therefore ensure that you select a professional SEO company that offers good search engine optimization services.
Once you understand that search engine promotion is not a short term deal, you should set about finding a search engine optimization specialist who understands the terms and conditions ser forth by the search engine companies, but also the strategies and methods that will result in your business being more popular and result in a higher ROI. SEO services are not just limited to keyword optimisation but also incorporate an overall revamp of your website. A good search engine optimisation consultant will know if the content on your webpage needs to be more user friendly, if your web page design needs to be altered to be more eye catching, they will be efficient in link building and the management of par per click programs (PPC).

The major benefit of hiring professional SEO services is that your site will have the vital tools and these experts know precisely what needs to be done in order to ensure positive results. In addition to all the various SEO techniques, the company which you hire will also help you generate a significant social media presence. Enlisting for professional SEO services is very affordable and just by getting onto the internet and with a few clicks of the mouse; a website owner can find all sorts of relevant information that is connected with companies that offer these types of services.

With the assistance of a search engine optimization services, online companies can now have there websites rank higher in the search engine index, thus leading more prospective customers to their websites, because the higher the rank of a website, the more likely that they will fall on the first page of a result list that is generated from a keyword search.

Marketing is an essential part of business, be it a small or mid or large scaled business. Marketing is a form of advertisement of a service or a product. Advertisement can be done through newspapers, radio, television, banner, hoardings, pamphlets, word of mouth, street plays, and Internet. Is your business based on Internet? Do you want to increase its visibility? Do you want more customers to boost your business? If the answer is yes for all these questions, then you can adopt Internet Marketing. Through Internet marketing, even a small business reaches the entire world, and can increase the sales of your business. Without proper planning and marketing, small businesses cannot target proper or appropriate clients. Moreover, if you want to save some money, and are not inclined for Internet Marketing, you may end losing the business itself.
There are different forms of Internet Marketing. They are

1. Pay per click advertising
2. Banner ads
3. Interactive advertising
4. E-mail Marketing
5. Search Engine Marketing
6. Blog Marketing
7. Article Marketing

You may have a small business; however, for Internet Marketing, you need a web site, because a good web site can market your business. To get a web site, you can even try the small business promoters who can design, develop and host a web site for you, and submit your web site to the search engines and directories. However, it is very important that to get good visibility and effective business, you need to remember these points:

1. Your web site should be professional and not jazzy.
2. Language used in the web site should be simple, professional and to the point.
3. Brief about your business should be in an effective manner without any jargons, or unnecessary and vague words.
4. Make sure that the web site is not cluttered with too much information. Neither keeps the pages too small nor too big, but appropriate and informative.
5. Make sure that the advertisements on your web site do not disturb your customers.

Before developing the web site, you should know the type of customers you are looking for, how to attract them to your web site, and how to avoid large businesses from squeezing your business. After going through the preliminary planning, then try Internet Marketing.

Email marketing, the least expensive form of Internet Marketing, which allows you to send emails to old customers, by being sent as ads in emails of other companies, and potential customers, who would have just registered themselves with you.

You can even adopt Search Engine Optimization, a popular and widely used form of Internet Marketing used by mainly small business or businesses that are just budding. Search Engines use a specific program that searches for particular keywords that a user wants to know about and displays the results in the Search Engine Resulted Pages or SERP. Most of the users would not be interested in checking the results in more than three pages of results. It is very important that your web site be listed within the three pages. Therefore, use appropriate keywords in your web site. By choosing this method, the relevant keyword’s ranking is improved while searching for them, in turn improving the ranking of the web site featuring them, if the website’s structure is revamped in such a way that it is easy to find relevant topics.

What are your thoughts on Internet Marketing? How have you used the forms above, or do you have suggestions on items I may have overlooked?

I’ve been playing with social media sites like Twitter and Facebook for a little over a year now, but really got into them the last 10 months when I saw the enormous opportunity to get my name out and find others with similar interests as myself. I’ll outline a few of the tools I use, how I use them, and examples of what I’ve done. This article is going to be geared towards vBulletin owners and using Twitter to build traffic and brand recognition, but could easily apply to other websites.

I’ll try to keep this thread updated if you have any questions, along with any new tips or tools I find along the way.

The Tools of the Trade

First off we need a few Twitter accounts. They are easy to make, take less than 30 seconds and you’ll have your very own Twitter account. You might want to start with one, but if you get all the tools that I’ll talk about, it’s a good idea to make a few and build them all at once. You might be asking yourself what username I should use. If you have a site of flying kites, and “square red kites” is one of your busiest sections @square_red_kites might be a good username to get. I would suggest checking out the google adword keyword tool and see if you can refine your username a little more. Maybe “red square kites” gets more searches. This just takes some playing around with, I wouldn’t suggest something real spammy like @free_free_kites, you can always change the name later but I would try to get it right the first time.

This is the tool I use to auto-follow users on Twitter, it allows me to follow users by a search phrase or follow users who follow others, or who they follow. I could also upload a text file if I had a list of users I wanted to follow. I’m sure there are many tools like it, a quick search of google for “twitter adder” will show quite a few. I paid $10-$20 for this program 10 months ago. It was a right place at the right time deal for me, getting it when it was in early beta stages. I see a purchase link for $50; I would look around if you are considering getting a program like this.

Next thing we’ll need is a Twitter client, I’ve been using Seesmic lately but started off with Tweetdeck. I really liked the look of Tweetdeck, you can make columns and searches to see “live search” updates of anything you want. I would use it to see if; anyone was talking about me or my business, and to see if anyone had questions I could answer such as “vBulletin” questions. I’ve been using Seesmic lately because of the ease of managing multiple Twitter accounts in one small easy to navigate screen. I suggest checking both of them out, as well as the numerous other Twitter clients available for your computer or phone.

Twitter has following limits, so sometimes you need to unfollow a few people to follow more. You can find out who is and is not following you. I would suggest if you do have to unfollow a few people in order to follow more, you unfollow those who aren’t following you back. A great webpage that will show you who is and is not following you is called Friend of Follow. You don’t need to hand over your login, just your Twitter username and it’ll display a list of your friends. You can than manually click a user and unfollow. When I started I would use this and unfollow those who hadn’t even changed the default icon, which at the time was the ugly brown o_O. These next two tools ask for your username and pass, I’ve been using both these for 10 months and NEVER had a problem. There are many bloggers who have written about these, I trust them but use at your own risk. Twitter Karma is a page similar to what you’ll see with Friend or Follow, but you can sort all by those not following, one click and check all, and one click and unfollow all. It’s a great tool, but has a limit of 10,000 follow/following count. Once I hit 10 followers, I had to find something else, I found Twitter Mutuality (now version 2) This tool is very straight forward, it will find all who aren’t following you and start unfollowing. You can stop it at any time by closing the browser.

Oh, btw.. The reason why we follow more and more people is because I’d say 4 out of 5 will naturally follow you back, the other 2 might considering what you tweet about.

Okay, so now we have a good twitter account with a high number of followers, we have to give them some content. You can do this a variety of ways in vBulletin, the easiest is Twitter feed. If you want to do it the right way, I would an application for the section or forum as a whole and user vBulletin Tweet poster by Milad. It’s a great product that will give your forum it’s own “source link” which doesn’t have the nofollow attribute attached. The idea is that you have an RSS feed of your forum or category, and we can make our Twitter account post updates with links and snipits to the threads being created.

Examples of what I’ve done

Here are a few examples of what I’ve done, 2 will be with forum sections and 2 will be with local blogs that I’m a part of.

We have a lot of WordPress styles that are posted on the forum, so I made @WordPress_Styles to help distribute to those looking for free WordPress themes.

I’m part of this program called Driving Revenue that will credit your account if someone clicks a link to a site like ebay from your site. I have a webmaster auctions section that I use RSS feeds from sites like ebay and other sites, to post the latest deals. I made @Driving_revenue as more or less a test account just to see what I could do as far as building traffic to that section.

Here is an account (@TopekaTweetup) I made for a local tweetup group I’m helping with. I use Twitterfeed to publish the lasts post as well as tweetup updates. We use the same #hash tags when we talk about the tweetups.

Another one I have is @TransformTopeka, it’s one of the “automated” ones that we as a group try to actually chat with local users with as well as it publishes are feeds. Both these Topeka ones also will update the status when someone on facebook comments on our Fan Pages (which I strongly recommend building for your business but that’s for another article)

My best example is my old vBulletinSetup account, @vBSetup is the one I use each and every day to carry on conversations with our members, with local people and with strangers who are talking about things I’m interested in

The one I’m working and focused on now is my @BrandonSheley account, I’m just over 7,000 followers as of this post, but I’m been growing about 1500 new followers each month and that will grow exponentially as I get more followers and can follow more. You can follow 10% more then the people following you.

To wrap this up

I suggest adding your forums icon or a category icon to your Twitter account. You can also upload your own background. Branding your background with your forum or category logo is also a good idea. You want this account to be an extension of the support you offer to your forum members. As you may notice from above, my strongest account is one that I carry on conversations with other users on Twitter. Speaking of conversations, a tool I didn’t mention because I ran out of time is Tweetboard. It’s a fabulous addon for any community that is tapped into Twitter.

As I said, I’ll try to update this post and reply to any questions you may have. I may even be back to write another article on getting the most out of Facebook and LinkedIn. If you want to read a few more articles on Social Media I have a few on my blog.

Marketing is an essential component for product proliferation and adoption across the targeted audience. Conventional marketing strategies have always been associated with a hefty budget and market research requirements. As the world is becoming smarter and more efficient people across the globe have started realizing the benefits of Internet Marketing. Internet has been able to penetrate all parts of the globe. Businesses and humans are not limited to a particular geography and all corners of the world are facilitating from the ease and use of Internet marketing initiatives.

There are too many advantages of using Internet marketing as the modern tool and strategy to draw more customers to trigger unprecedented growth. Let’s explore some of the key ones:

• Internet marketing has been more effective when measured on the aspect of product meeting the eyes of an end user.
• You can design and woo your customers in a better way without much time and investments on an Internet Marketing enabled campaign. With less cycle time you can meet more needs of your customers when compared to conventional channel.
• One of the best aspect of an Internet Marketing campaign is that it meets the eye of the target much faster and in a concentrated way.
• You can manage your leads and convert them into opportunities in a faster manner too.
• It has proven to provide a clear cut communication between the customer and the service provider.
• Internet marketing leads to product innovation. Vendors are informed about the preferences and likings of the end user and they manufacture or present the services in a desired manner.
• Proliferation of your service portfolio is pretty easy and simple online. Within no time you can create a campaign and send it across to major social networks including LinkedIn. Twitter or Stumble Upon. You can better your online revenues and increase your bottom-line over the period of time.
• With better customer satisfaction and increased bottom-line you are sure to become a prominent entity in the segment of your industry.
• More people admit to the fact that Internet marketing and an online presence can provide a more trustworthy image of self or business online. It has helped in new customer acquisition and growth even in the challenging times of recession.

Internet as an arena is growing year by year. More number of users are buying or are interested in buying products and services online than ever before. Challenges will lie ahead for the vendors to differentiate themselves in order to stay in the hunt of customer acquisition, Retention and growth. Innovation through Internet and Internet marketing can help companies to stay afloat and nurture their talent pool and strengths in correct direction.

So if you have been interested all this while in carrying out Internet Marketing efforts, make an attempt now. Just ensure that you know your niche and the demands of customers well enough. You are sure to grow your online business if you can offer value to your customers online.

The website is: thewirelessregister

• helped setup a server on the local host
• troubleshoot PHP issues

Social bookmarking has been around for quite some time now. More number of people are resorting to social bookmarking through popular networks – Twitter, Stumble Upon, and Delicious.  So what is social bookmarking? To put in simple words a social bookmark is similar to your book’s bookmark where you keep a placeholder to start reading again the next time you open the same page.

Social bookmarks categories your website based on its niche. You could submit your website on all popular social bookmarking sites based on the categories – Social Media, Business, Websites Updates etc. You may get to choose your site as blog or content management system or any other platform.

Tags, Title and Description of your website are some of the essentials that you would require while marketing your website through social bookmarking sites. It is imperative to note that social bookmarking also draws a sizable amount of traffic on your website. And if you have been wondering how is that possible? The answer is that major search engines including Google and Yahoo are friendly to the bookmarking sites. You can achieve a higher indexing rate if you bookmark, needless to mention that they also act as a source of a back link for your website.

Bookmarking your website is pretty simple and easy. You can explore some of the popular social bookmarking sites by creating an account with them and submitting your website. Within few days you would experience an increase in traffic and better indexing of your content on all major search engines. You are all set to earn through affiliates once you start to get a sizable amount of traffic through bookmarks. So what are you waiting for? Get set going and submit your website or blog to major social networks and start realizing the benefits.

This is a site I’ve worked on a few times, the owner is a great guy!

wedoitallvegas is running the latest 4.x software

• This last time I upgraded the vbulletin
• upgraded and tweaked vBSEO

Yesterday Internet Brands (owners of Jelsoft) released their vBulletin 4.0 Gold edition just like they promised us earlier this year. Less than 24 hours we had our first patch release; I wouldn’t be surprised if they had another update or two before the end of the year. There has been a lot of negative discussion about the iNet take over and it all started for me with the vbulletin-4-0-going-cost-even-17392.html” target=”_blank”>leaked screenshots back in May. At the time I was a little upset about the price hike but looking back, it really wasn’t that big of an issue. I don’t currently have an active vBulletin site, but I do have a dev site setup with vBSEO and I’m testing a customized setup of URL setting based off what Brent uses on Mustang Evolution. These will be very short URL’s and easier to remember. I don’t have plans as of now to open up a vBulletin forum, but I need a dev site to stay up to date if I’m going to continue offering vBulletin services.

What are your thoughts on the new 4.x series so far? I like the forums; I think they could use some fine tuning. I haven’t tested the blogs but from the quick glance it didn’t seem like they changed much. I don’t really care for the new vBCMS. I don’t like the fact that you can’t place your CMS in the root and forums in a subfolder. It just seems rough around the edges but what better what to get feedback than to release the product to the masses if it works like advertised or not.

I’ve been playing around with IP.Content on IPBSetup.com and it isn’t sold as a CMS, but you can make one with it pretty easily. That’s what I’m using on the home page, and here is a demo page I had made a few days before testing things out. Right now I’m just using a free CSS template I found on google, but you can see I’m able to add blocks (like the recent post feed on the right hand side of the home page) I can make database pages to, I need to play around with it, but I like that you can just past HTML into an editor and make a page. This is another thing the new vBulletin CMS is lacking.

I think this is the first forum I’ve worked on from a guy in Topeka.

Met up with him during lunch and talked things over.

• I helped setup openX on Let’s Talk Forum
• installed vbadvanced and helped with the side bar intergration
• answered a few questions dealing with openx and the forum

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.

The 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.
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.

To quickly summarize what I’m trying to get across in this article; don’t ever give up, be passionate about your topics and give your members what they want. Having a unique skin will help if it’s tied to the subject matter like TalkDelaware is. Provide help across all forums will help your membership grow, just like Chase did on the old Delaware forum, he offered his help and the members followed him over to his new and better forum. Chase also provides help on webmaster forums, including graphics help and suggestions to managing your community, which I feel he knows a great deal on both topics. Provide help to your members, and offer them incentives to stay on your site, and they will help advertise your site without you even knowing about it.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first article in my series on being a successful forum owner, please comment and let me know what you would like to know about in my next article.

My thoughts on vBulletin and IP.Board.

If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I ran a vBulletin powered forum for many years and just recently sold it. I’ll try to outline a few of the reasons why I “switched to the dark side” and setup an Invision Powered Services forum. The number one reason I would have even considered sticking with vBulletin is the vBSEO product. IPB does have SEO mods but they just don’t seem to match up to the power that vBSEO brings to the vBulletin platform. With that being said, I made a thread on the IPB support forums titled “How to SEO our IPB forum” I’ve picked up a few tips which I’ve implemented on my IPBSetup forum, but there has to be a few more options I haven’t found yet.

I didn’t have a problem at first with the buyout of Jelsoft to internet brands, but after seeing all the old developers leave and the drastic changes that have taken place; I see why people were getting so upset over it. I like how Invision actually uses their CMS for their homepage, vBulletin just has some generic html pages up which do look good, but it’s not showcasing the ability of their suit when they are pushing hard for sales. I had a chance to do some early beta testing on vBulletin and boy did it have a lot of bugs. I know it was in beta but I would of thought some of the major issues would be been fixed in development, it seems they just want to push something out and make it appear as if they care about the end forum user. I think they are really just interested in their own network (iNet) but I could be wrong and I hope I am because I still have a lot of friends that use vBulletin for their forums.

One thing I really like about IPB and wish vBulletin would consider adding this to their lineup is the search box in the admin control panel of IPB. You know how on yahoo if you start typing something you’ll get a dropdown box with suggestions? You’ll find the same thing in the IPB admincp area; it’s been very helpful for me since I don’t know my way around IPB yet.

I don’t think it will be long and IPB will be the #1 forum software for professionals, especially the way iNET is running Jelsoft. I do wish everyone the best, I still love vBulletin but IPB is climbing up with every chance I get to mess around and figure things out. My next big purchase is going to be IP.Content and I’ll have a tightly integrated CMS that will match my forum. This is something I had always wanted from vBulletin and even with the new vBCMS, it just doesn’t fulfill my needs like IP.Content will.

What are some things you like about vBulletin over IPB or IPB over vBulletin? I look forward to your comments. This is a dofollow blog, so search engines will spider your links.

I’ll go over what it really takes to be a successful forum owner and how you should go about building your empire in the following weeks. I have a few people that I’ve already mentioned this blog post to, and they are very interested in being showcased. If you’ve built a successful forum and would like me to do a blog post on you, please contact me via email and I’ll consider adding you to the list.
Some of the topics I’ll highlight will be.

• How you can easily build backlinks and traffic to your forum.
• What you should consider when building your community (members point of view)
• What topics/threads should you start up on your forum?
• Should you use a CMS?
• Types of sites you can build to support your forum.
• What forum script I would suggest.
• Check out the competition.

I’m looking forward to writing these reviews, I’ve had the privilege of watching these forums grow up while I ran vBulletinSetup and I’m honored to have known these admins.

Here is my first article in the series. (I’ll update this list as the articles get published)

• How to run a successful state niche forum

I’ve been running vBSetup for years, since June of 06 actually. I’m not going to lie and say I won’t be sad to sell, but it had to be done. I just don’t have the time to commit to the forums like I did before Leo came around.  I’ll still visit the forums a few times a week, but not having to worry about software/hardware updates and issues is going to be a huge relief for me. I announced to the members yesterday of the purchase and had an overall positive take on the acquisition. I look forward to seeing what Crowdgather does with the site. I know they have some great resources and can really push the forum to the next level. I’ll miss being able to email or market anything to 12,000 users with a flip of a switch, but I think I’ll still be talking to all the active users via Twitter or other forums.

I’m not leaving the forum scene all together; I had purchased IPBHelp a few months back when I was thinking about expanding my services to IPB. I got a job with the state shortly after I purchased that license and URL and didn’t really have time for it. I still don’t have a lot of time, but enough to tinker around with it once a week. I’ve already added a WordPressMU to the root as well as IP.Converge which will allow users to login to the forum and their blogs with the same login (email & pass). I don’t have it working 100% yet, but it shouldn’t take me much longer. I’ll always love vBulletin, but doubt I’ll ever own another vBulletin license unless I win the lotto and free up all my time, which I don’t even play so that’s not likely..lol

Everything else is going great; Leo is crawling and getting close to walking. I’ve been busy “baby proofing” the house because Leo likes to open the cabinets and any drawer he can reach. He is finally sleeping through the night which is AWESOME! It only took him 7 month but his mother and I are very grateful for the added hours of sleep.

Well that’s a short update of what’s going on, I plan to post a disc golf blog post at some point, so that will probably be the next update you see on this blog.

Have a good one everyone, and thanks for reading this blog post. Please Retweet it (if you’re on Twitter) or share the link with your friends. Word of mouth is the best form of advertising.

If you didn’t hear, I’ve pushed all vBulletin Services work that was coming into Sheley Enterprises, to the forums. This is because I was recently offered a Web Application Developer job at KDOT and between that and my family; I wasn’t going to have time to work on vBulletin forums. 

I took the interview and 4 days later I was offered the job! I’ve been there one week and it seems like a perfect fit. I’m able to continue to work on the web and learn new things. I’m working with Visual Studio 2008 at work; I’ve installed the free version at my home office. (Visual Studio Express) I’ve been learning how to use ASP.NET, Visual Basic and C#. I’m going to be taking some classes on MySQL and modifying the database of our sites. I’ve taken a few pictures, I’m really close to the capital building, and this is the look from our lunch area on the 4th floor.

Leo has been going to Alissa’s cousins (Lindsey) house for babysitting. She has a little boy a few weeks older than Leo names Owen; they seem to have a good time together. We have a backup babysitter to check out this weekend, in case Lindsey is sick or wants a break. Speaking of Leo, he is growing up so fast; he’ll be crawling around before too long. He’s such a sweetheart, we just wish he would sleep a few more hours in a row at night..lol

You may have noticed, I moved all the content from brandon.sheley.org to this URL and blog, that was an older blog and I’ve redirected everything from it to this one, so you may want to update your bookmarks if you had been following along.  I may do the same with SheleyEnterpirses.com after I close that business down later this year.

I’m going to move my sites to a new server in the next 2 months. I’ll do my best to limit the amount of down time, but with a few dozen sites, it will take me time to move all the files and setup the databases again.

Life is good and busy, I’ve been working on a few other sites as well. TopekaTweetup has been going real good, we’ve had a few Tweetups and look forward to many more in the future. Another site I recently started is IPBHelp.me, it’s going to be one day a support site for IPB fans, I already have vBulletinSetup.com, time to branch out to IPB. I’ve had a few members from the vBulletin forum sign up and check it out; it’s just a place to allow the vB guys/gals to see what can be done with IPB. We’re working on a few sites for TransformTopeka like ReThinkTopeka and a Topeka Transit site (not open yet) that are turning out nicely.

As always, you can follow me on twitter under @BrandonSheley or @vBSetup (my active account) as well as Facebook if you want to see what I’m up to day to day.

I really like the home page to SenseOfCommunity and how the admin has integrated it with the forum.

• Installed vBSEO & Optimized it
• Optimized the vBulletin forum

The owner of CypressTXConnection needed a clone made of the site so they could do some testing and developing.