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?

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?

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.

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.

Are you a forum owner, or would you like to be? Forums require a scipt and hosting to run. I’ll quickly go over some of the basics that you’ll need to setup your own forum. First off the script, I prefer vBulletin, but you can use IPB as well as free scripts like SMF, phpBB and MyBB.

I choose vBulletin for a number of reasons, one being the upgrades. As I previously mentioned, I had used phpBB before switching to vBulletin. I hated updating all the php files when you needed to do an upgrade on a modded phpBb forum. I’m not sure if the current version of phpBB has easier upgrades, but I’d had enough of phpBB. Time for vBulletin the professional forum script; I had looked at IPB (the other paid alternative) but was not impressed with the actual look of the forum from a users point of view. I used vBulletin for the first 9 months and it was great, then they released the plugin and product system which allowed mods to be with one upload and a click of a button. The product/plugin addition also made the upgrades much easier. You could update a fully modded forum in a matter of seconds, you still need to update each of the templates but you’re still saving time of updating php files.

One of the great addons for vBulletin is a product called vBSEO. vBulletin Search Engine Optimization in one single product. You can do a number of the tweaks that vBSEO does with other addons, but you can’t do everything and who really wants to install 20 hacks to take the place of one? Not to mention the strain 20 hacks will have on your forum and that’s just 20 more chances for a security exploit. vBSeo is the #1 SEO script for vBulletin, I will not start a forum without it. Even if it’s a very small forum, and low on funds, you have to take every advantage that you can in optimizing your forum for search engines.

So if you want the best forum possible, you’ll want vBulletin and vBSEO. Now we can talk a little about hosting. You should be able to get a good host for less than $10 a month to start off. Then as your site goes, you’ll need to extend your hosting packageto cover the traffic and bandwidth that your site will be consuming. If you want to host several sites, you may want to look into a VPS or virtual private server. That’s what I use on my websites it allows me total control that your shared hosting plans aren’t going to give you.

I hope I’ve explained a few things here, feel free to ask any questions. I’ll be posting some articles on building back links and advertising for your forums in the near future. If you do need any help setting up your vBulletin forum or would like to talk on the phone and brainstorm topics for your forum, you can contact me at my Professional vBulletin Services pages on one of my other blogs.

Peter was a pleasure to work with on Small Business Forum

I really like the colors on this style, This site just needed a little work done. Basically to Optimize the site and update everything.

here is the list

• vBSEO Upgrade and Optimize
• vBulletin Upgrade and Optimization
• vBulletin Style Header Work
• added a few pages to the vBulletin forum
• SEO Optimization

Fish-Keeping is another site by my buddy Gary,  it’s been around for many years.

This client has two vBulletin sites that I’ve helped and done some work on.
With this site, we’ve upgraded from 3.5.x and have added a style and a gallery.
This site was pretty simple to setup and here is a list of some other hacks or mods that was done.

• upgrades from 3.5.x
• photoplog gallery
• shoutbox
• vbadvanced
• style and matching logo

World of Digital was built brand new from an old URL that the client had.

When we first installed vBulletin we had 3.5.0 and have since updated each times it’s been needed.

The client wanted a lot of goodies in the postbit section and the members love the vBux and all the graphics in the postbit..

The site has a light and dark style both are hacked out completely.

This client has another site which I’ll look to in a min.

here is a short list of what was done

• vBseo
• vBadvanced
• vBshout
• photoplog vBulletin Gallery
• upgrades, and upgrades
• seo optimization

(This was one of my first sites, Gary was a great guy to work with and it’s awesome to see his site still going strong)