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Archive for the ‘Websites’ Category

Proud new owner of Admin Talk – Forum Administrator Support Center

15 Sep

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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Starting a Free Blogging Network

28 Jul

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

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

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

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

 
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Posted in Reviews, Websites

 

I’m addicted to vBulletin Forums

03 Feb

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. Read the rest of this entry »


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