Brandon Sheley » Sheley Enterprises

Proud new owner of Admin Talk – Forum Administrator Support Center

Brandon Sheley — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 03:53:45 +0000

I’ve been buying and merging forums now for a little over a year and up until recently I’ve merged all of them into my general forum. I recently picked up a nice little admin forum called Admin Talk as well as a smaller one called AdminGang that was merged into AdminBB last week. I’ve been on the lookout for a nice webmaster site for a while.
My general forum site has a webmaster section but it’ll never take off like a site dedicated to admin stuff. Not to say the general forum isn’t doing well, in fact it’s doing very well as far as I’m concerned. We’re constantly getting new members that are coming on and posting and the spam isn’t bad for our small 3 man team.
I’m really looking forward to this project, and so far with what little I’ve done, the stats are looking great. We’re still in the process of moving it over to my servers. Once that happens and I can make sure everything is secure I’ll really start diving into the site. It already has a link directory running on phpld that’s dedicated to forum listings. I think this is a great opportunity to make my investment back and limit the amount of ads on the forum itself. I’ve had success with phpld link directories in the past and things have only gotten better in the 3 years since I’ve used the script.

Here is a quick screenshot of the stats since I picked up the site, you’ll see the jump halfway through when I added AdminGang and some of our search engine referrals started to pick up. I have several goals for this site. One of them being sub 17,000’s in Alexa and yes I know that Alexa doesn’t mean much but it is a somewhat decent way to measure webmaster type forums. Also my last webmaster forum hit 18,000 so I figured I’d shoot to get lower with this one.

I’m looking forward to the future of this forum, the acquisition has been positive and the members are active.

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powered by SMF best dive shop key largo (1)

Testimonial for GyanForums

Brandon Sheley — Fri, 20 May 2011 02:42:17 +0000

Here is a testimonial for one of my past clients, GyanForums.

I found Brandons services via a forum and I am glad I found it. He is delight to work with very helpful, prompt responses and well researched. On top of that he is a very nice person to interact with even answering to my barrage of emails. I would strongly recommend him and will work with him in the future as well.

GyanForums

Brandon Sheley — Fri, 20 May 2011 02:38:08 +0000

Here is GyanForums and it came to me looking for some help with their forum. They’re looking for design help, which I don’t do to much of so I passed on that, but they did need some seo questions.

Here is the list.

optimized vbulletin
optimized vbseo
gave other suggestions

Shop SBT Forum

Brandon Sheley — Fri, 20 May 2011 02:17:16 +0000

The Shop SBT Forum came to me from a client referral and needed some seo work done.

Here is the list

setup vbseo
optimize vbulletin
updated vbulletin

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My Scrapbooking Nook

Brandon Sheley — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 04:48:11 +0000

This project was a scrapbooking forum that started off on phpbb with photopost and needed imported to vBulletin on a new server.

The phpbb site had a bad spam problem with 10’s of 1,000’s of spammers on the forum. I think we pruned 30,000 members before handing it off. I never really talked with the owner, I talked to his/her designer. Which btw, the style on this site look great, really nice look overall. I suggested photopost do the upgrade and they did just fine. I did have to transfer the gallery files the new server and that ended up being about 10gigs. (Google fiber would have been nice!)

Here is the list of what needed done from me.
Moved phpbb site/db to the new server
Installed and imported into vBulletin
Moved the photopost files/db to the new server
Helped with a some mods and vBulletin questions

Virtual pet list community

Brandon Sheley — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 04:34:43 +0000

One of the most impressive aspects of the Internet is that, no matter what your interests are, you can find somebody else on the Internet who shares that interest with you. And so it was that yet another gap was filled when Virtual Pet List was created. Originally, it was just supposed to be a site listing for pet game sites, but the forum proved to be the much more popular aspect.

Running on vBulletin for most of its life, VPL filled in a niche need: instead of having forums just to discuss one particular pet site, those who enjoyed the genre as a whole could come together. While it would never be as successful as the major forums, it was highly successful within its targeted audience.

While run out of passion for the virtual pet genre, a lot of important lessons were learned from its operation. The growing community resulted in lessons in dealing with customer support, promotion and handling unruly users. Naturally, these lessons were sometimes difficult to learn the hard way by experiencing problems firsthand, but accepting that you’re flawed is how you can improve. The years of hands on experience has led to overall stronger leadership and a likewise stronger forum. The site has survived numerous downtimes, including being hacked, and come back stronger each time. This is because the staff and owners are passionate about the subject matter of their forum, and thus have successfully crafted not just a message board, but an intentional community.

This is a point that can’t be stressed enough. Even if you’re good with SEO, marketing, connections and all the other business sides of things, if you’re going to start a niche forum you had either better be interested yourself, or find some interested people to help you run it. Niche audiences can tell when someone isn’t genuinely part of their group, and the community will feel the ramifications of your outsider status. Someone who isn’t much of a gamer can start up a successful enough gaming forum, but if you want something more specific like one for visual novels or virtual pets, you’ll never see your full potential realized if it’s nothing more than a cash grab to you. These sorts of sites live and die by their staff. It’s how they go from mere discussion areas to a second home.

Running this sort of forum can have its vexing moments. If you run a forum wherein you take a hands on approach, prepare to be compared to Hitler just for enforcing a rule. In a community where everyone knows everyone, disagreements can get very personal as well, and it will tend to be up to you to calm things down. Yet it’s knowing that at the end of the day you’ve provided the best experience you can to your users that makes any such hassles all feel worth it. And when you do your job right, users will spread knowledge of your forum via word of mouth, and you’ll have a dedicated and passionate user base. Ad campaigns and search engine rankings all help, but being a good admin is a key factor. Always remember that you’re not just an operator of the site, but a member as well.

Running a niche forum isn’t supremely profitable from a monetary standpoint, but it is incredibly rewarding from a personal one.

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The Iron Den Bodybuilding Forum

Brandon Sheley — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 15:00:21 +0000

I was approached by Jerry of The Iron Den Bodybuilding Forum asking for a little help with his setup.

Here is the list of what we updated/fixed.

updated the vBulletin forum
updated vBSEO
optimized vBulletin
optimized vBSEO
fixed a few bugs from a previous forum upgrade

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vBulletin/vBSEO Optimization on 2 forums

Brandon Sheley — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 15:35:26 +0000

I had a client contact me last week asking me to overhaul both their forums.
This is the short list.

optimized vBulletin
optimized vBSEO
setup a vBSEO sitemap
setup Google analytic
setup Google webmaster tools
configured the robots.txt file to help focus the search engine bots

GB Riders and The European BMW K Club

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Sheley Enterprises Fan Page

Brandon Sheley — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 23:50:36 +0000

I’ve added a new page to our Facebook Fan Page, it looks like this.

What do you think?

Testimonial Powder Coating Forum

Brandon Sheley — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:06:33 +0000

Brandon it was a pleasure having you transfer our Forum from Phpbb to
VBulletin with over 80 thousand posts. Our users love the new Forum and the
Facebook Integration. We would highly recommend Branden for any client
looking to set up or transfer the VBulletin Software.

David A. Williams
Marketing Director
Powder Buy the Pound

Top search terms:

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Testimonial from Ten-41.com

Brandon Sheley — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 16:46:40 +0000

I’m normally REAL stingy when it comes to handing out praise.

But I’ll make an exception in this case!

Brandon offered to help me fix a failed vBulletin upgrade when I posted my problem on vBulletin.org. My field is hardware, not software, and when I attempted to perform a normally simple software upgrade I managed to pretty much mess up the works on my Host Provider as well as making a basket case of my vBulletin installation.

Brandon straightened out my mess and had me up and running again in no time.

My Forum is still is the beginning stages and not active yet, but thanks to Brandon’s expertise I only have a few more tweaks to perform before I can go live.

I can guarantee that if I run into any more problems I’ll contact Brandon for his services and know that my issues will be resolved.

Uncle Mike,

Owner,

Ten-41.com

Testimonial from Team-BHP.com

Brandon Sheley — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 05:09:55 +0000

I contacted Brandon after receiving a couple of recommendations on his work, and seeing the Senior status he enjoyed on multiple vbulletin-focussed communities. Our forum’s SEO was in dire need of a complete overhaul…even the SEO fundamentals were missing! Brandon came onboard immediately & implemented corrective measures in the same week. He also made a couple of high-value suggestions on areas where we could improve our SEO standing. I’m left impressed with his overall understanding of vbulletin, vbseo and the SEO subject itself. Great work, definitely a return customer” Rush Parekh from www.Team-BHP.com

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Powder Coating Forum

Brandon Sheley — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:38:45 +0000

This was an interesting import, we moved the forum over from phpbb, to vBulletin and optimized the setup.

Here is the list

imported forum into vBulletin
optimized the vBulletin install
answered several questions about vBulletin
A few more changes, just general maintenance

Check out the Powder Coating Forum, it’s a nice setup and the owner also posted a testimonial.

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A story about Outdoor-Fishing.com

Brandon Sheley — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 15:28:07 +0000

There are many misconceptions that new admins make about starting forums. The two most common ones are; forums are easy money makers, and getting people to join is easy. The truth is starting a forum is just about as “easy” as learning to walk. Not to mention all the time that goes into creating and designing everything, building a forum is like building a Ranch House from scratch. If you want to see your forum on page one of Google, then you better be prepared to put continuous hours into your community. Precision and accuracy are key to building a success. How often do you see a football coach sit down and take a snooze during a practice session? Every minute, every practice, every day, is dedicated to building the best and being the best. Lacking those details is what will set you apart from other forums. Today, the Internet is full of competition and you’re competing against the absolute best and most experienced website owners on the Net!

So here’s the story on Outdoor-Fishing.com:

It was about mid March of 2010 when I got this fancy idea of starting my own forum. I had no experience in running online forums, and I also had no idea what I was getting myself into. Of course just like anyone else I was excited to put my time into building a forum. I mean, who wouldn’t like to have their very own forum community? Or so I thought…

If you’re familiar with forum software then you’d probably heard of Simple Machines Forum (SMF). With the help of an experienced technical admin (who later became a great supporter of the site), I decided to choose SMF. Prior to this, I’ve frequently visited many forums and have successfully established a solid understanding of how things work. With SMF being the one, the technical admin and I, put our thoughts and ideas together to build our small community. I was more focused on handling the visual aspect, while the technical admin was handling the “back-end” of things. A month or so later we were just about to officially announce the opening of our site. At this time I was already advertising my site, making promises, encouraging friends and family to join, and so forth. I scattered my site links in many different places like forum sites, Yahoo, Emailing, related fishing sites, etc. I was also successful in talking a “future” sponsor to join the site. He later become a strong supporter and is now a moderator (a very good one I might add).

With the forum now almost ninety-percent complete, we started experiencing some problems. I strive to recreate what most of the large forums had; blogs, good user profiles, image uploading software, spell check, just to mention a few. Unfortunately, SMF didn’t have the full “building blocks” that I was looking for. Yes, they had the basics, but I felt that this just wasn’t enough. This is when talks of upgrading to vBulletin (paid forum software), became more serious. At this point in time, I started to realize that if you wanted to be on page one of Google (or at least close), in a niche as broad as mine then there should be no reason why forum software should set your forum back from your competitors. About three weeks later I purchased a copy of vB and everything was transferred.

I’m not going to go into much detail of what was done for the next fourth months, but there was a lot of work put into everything. Posts are transferable, the rest is not. Everything was being re-designed, new theme, new plugins, new logo, etc. Prior to this we experienced a three week setback regarding hosting issues. Four months later everything was complete. By this time, and I mean it when I say this, I went through the vB archives. I spent four solid days just finding a theme I liked. Even the paid vB themes didn’t look appealing to me unless they were in the $500 range. And I’m not trying to say this to brag, I know that those minor details is what mattered and I wanted to make sure I had the absolute perfect theme for my site.

I opened the doors to the forum in the last week of August, 2010. With the help of a few family and friends we managed to successfully gain our first 100 members in just a few weeks. At this time, I also sponsored a contest, which turned out to be a huge success. The forum grew very quickly, thanks to social networking and a few other popular sites. With a good stream of members coming in, we’re currently sitting at 450 registered members. That’s a rapid growth rate in just seven weeks! And we still haven’t stopped! One thing that I’d like mention about recruiting members is that recruiting members is a never-ending process. When people see the dedication that you put into building your forum, they will start to take notice and that’s when the new registrants will increase.

A few quick pointers for “new” admins:

Work on the details that includes visual, technical, verbal, etc. – this matters!
Build a good staff team. Remember, a good staff team doesn’t have to be big in numbers. A good staff team understands individual duties and does what is required of them for the good of the site.
Recruit, recruit, and when you have members coming in you should still continue to recruit!
Strive for success and learn from your competition. Often times you will find that your competing sites are your best bet. It’s not very difficult to see what they don’t have that makes you stand out. Use this to your advantage!

To wrap it up, our forum is still growing strong. We have many unique individuals who are posting some great content and sharing their “fishing knowledge” with the rest of the crew. It’s great to see members participating together and discussing something that’s fun and physically healthy for you!

And my favorite Bible quotes:

He said, “Throw your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some.” When they did, they were unable to haul the net in because of the large number of fish. John 21:6

God bless and I wish you all success in starting your forums!

Strive for success,

“Fish-Hook”

Founder of Outdoor-Fishing.com

Credits:

Technical Admin: MordyT – A great guy that will help you with whatever he can!

To our staff team and recent admin. You know who you are!

Thanks to the support from our great members and sponsors!

Top search terms:

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Themesinc – The Leading Provider of XenForo Styles

Brandon Sheley — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 03:50:24 +0000

Today I am going post a successful forum review, but it’s not going to be a vBulletin forum this time. Although the owner was one of the original vBulletin style designers, this forum is powered by xenForo. Before we get into that, let me tell you a little about this owners past.

Miko Magni started vBStyles.com late 2003 after designing skins for UBB (Perl) forums. VBStyles quickly grew and gained an exceptional reputation for quality coding and design services. Today vBStyles is listed number one in Google for the top keywords; vbsetup, vbulletin styles, vbulletin skins.

Miko has since sold vBStyles and is on to bigger and better things. He now runs ThemesInc.com which can be used to display several frameworks and not limited to vBulletin like vBStyles was.

He is currently working on the newly released forum script called xenForo. The script is still in the early beta stages so there hasn’t been a lot of time yet for anyone to play with the layout much. From what I’ve read on their official support forums, this is going to be a “modern forum”. It’s been named as the vBulletin Killer, I think there is room for everyone but only time will tell.

Here is a quote from Miko “We are working hard to produce the most sophisticated skins you are likely to see for XenForo community forum.”

I have no doubt that Miko will build another impressive empire for design enthusiast. I strongly suggest for everyone to bookmark ThemesInc right now, this next year is going to make or break the xenForo community. We will see amazing things coming out of all the eager designers and programmers wanting to say there were part of something great. (Official Facebook page, Twitter profile)

Have you had a chance to play with xenForo yet? I have a few friends that have purchased the script so I’ve been able to see the admin side. What are your thoughts? I know a lot of vBulletin people read this blog, are you thinking about importing your vBulletin forum to xenForo?

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The Ministry of Rum forum

Brandon Sheley — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:18:00 +0000

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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WDW Radio Disney Forums Testimonial

Brandon Sheley — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 15:26:15 +0000

I found Brandon through Twitter more than a year ago and inquired about assistance with my vBulletin community of more than 30,000 members. His simple Tweet and my email led me to work with one of the finest, most professional and talented developers I have ever had the pleasure of working with.

In addition to installing a number of useful hacks on my site, he installed and optimized my SEO and forum configuration, as well as made additional upgrades, suggestions and changes to make my forum not only run better, but offer a much improved user experience for both me and the forum members. His fees were extremely reasonable and it was money very well spent.

Brandon is not only good at what he does, but is extremely professional, courteous and prompt in his replies and his performance.

I highly recommend Brandon for any and all vBulletin needs.

———————————–
Lou Mongello
Host of the WDW Radio Show – http://WDWRadio.com
Author of the Walt Disney World Trivia Books & Audio Guides to WDW
Publisher, Celebrations Magazine – http://CelebrationsPress.com
Twitter: http://Twitter.com/LouMongello
Facebook: http://Facebook.com/WDWRadio

Starting a Free Blogging Network

Brandon Sheley — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 04:58:44 +0000

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.

Build Your Personal Brand

Brandon Sheley — Mon, 31 May 2010 02:41:08 +0000

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!

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Merging a quarter million post with General-Forums.com

Brandon Sheley — Thu, 13 May 2010 18:41:45 +0000

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.