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Posts Tagged ‘general forums’

Our first Posting Contest on General-Forums.com

19 Jun

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?

 
3 Comments

Posted in Forums

 

Merging a quarter million post with General-Forums.com

13 May

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.

 
4 Comments

Posted in Forums, Sheley Enterprises

 

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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12 Comments

Posted in Sheley Enterprises, vBulletin, Websites