Revenue & Success Achieving Module Request: XOOPS Case Study (long article)
Hello Everyone, Greetings! This case study is written in the views of an average webmaster, who wants to build success in community building using XOOPS Core CMS engine. (In respective parameters like Revenue, Promotion, Popularity & Reputation & Reliability, Trust and Stability).
In nutshell, the outcome of this Case Study is focusing on the following aspects, and I recommend every site owners to read this article.
a)Listing the most wanted and essential modules
b)How to find a reliable solution for module compatibly issues
c)Tips & Suggestions to improve www.xoops.org and its services
d)Give confidence to XOOPS site owners that their community can be a success and make revenues
e)Encouraging the new XOOPS Site Owners
f)Analyze the root failure of a XOOPS Site owner in Business Views.
g)Analyze where XOOPS stands now, and what is the future of XOOPS
To start with, I'm newbie in using Xoops, though I know about XOOPS for the past 2 to 3 years through Fantascio (A bundled collection of many reliable packages distributed with Cpanel of my hosting company) Recently, I’ve switched over to XOOPS from Post Nuke and my every further community building will be based on Xoops. Yes, XOOPS is really wonderful.
Objective of every webmasters using XOOPS is to build a large focused community (let it be automotive fans club, sports club, students association, corporate networks, or medical or travel review sites). And community is a strong gathering of users. A webmaster running XOOPS fails whenever he cannot build his community that is ACTIVE (I mean, there is no sense in boosting that my website have 5000 users, if only 20 or 30 are active and rest are idle). So, we need revenue to promote our website, and on the other end need cost effective channels to promote our self to build an active community (Perhaps, everyone cannot afford PPC Search engines, Google Adwords, TV & News papers advertisements, Affiliate marketing Campaigns etc).
So, considering these two factors like
a) HOW TO MAKE REVENUE FROM A XOOPS WEBSITE THROUGH ETHICAL MORAL ASPECT &
b) HOW TO PROMOTE & BUILD A SUCCESSFUL ONLINE COMMUNITY.
I’ would like to suggest few module enhancements. (Sorry, if I’m stupid myself and these modules are already available) What I believe is every REQUEST should have a REASON & LOGIC behind that, so please tolerate my talks, feedbacks, views and suggestions in the eye of a small webmaster. Perhaps, most of the XOOPS site owners here might face the same “heart and soul” feelings of a Webmaster as I am.
People who use Xoops, Post nuke and other similar CMS management scripts are typically webmasters or small community builders (Who need cost effective budget websites with business limitations). Off course XOOPS have a structured community module set say right from forums, downloads, gallery, reviews, news, rss feeders and even a small set of business, finance modules.
Nowadays, with proper plans and outline of every XOOPS modules and module hacks, a professional webmaster could easily make Business & Corporate Websites (CRM, Project Management, and Official Intranets) or an Entertainment or Social Community, or a Fans club - So, XOOPS is ahead in the right path, and no doubts about it & my Salutations to the entire XOOPS team.
Now my question is How far a Webmaster or a Person spending time, efforts and dedication on his website make money or how easier he can promote his website? I know of few people using XOOPS community for non commercial sites, building religious or social communities and struggling to meet their hosting and bandwidth expenses. Even I know people with innovative smart ideas promoting wonderful discussion board or communities, later running after sponsors to meet their hosting expenses. Yes, some win, some struggle & unfortunately some are forced to shut down their sites. And people, who struggle face problems like, slow performing sites, fear of excess bandwidth, site crashes. (always everyone dreams to have their own dedicated servers and robust services, but will small webmasters reach their goals?).
Well, on other side of the coin, there are people who could afford robust web servers, have plans and logics to customize their XOOPS application (commercial, non commercial, charity, or entertainment) based websites. But, how far we could get landmark with our own project and get social recognition in this huge cyber world with millions of online communities. Promotion & marketing our online community is the primary concern here. Have not you and me & this entire world seen the most beautiful website community started with a dream vision and build on XOOPS with thousands of reviews, useful articles and related stuff, but hardly with a poor community strength of 200 or 300 inactive users? Yes they fail? Their time and efforts fails? Is it?
Yes, after all, 80% of the people running after Open Source Code Projects are enthusiastic, and dreamy webmasters who struggle to achieve themselves with the limitation of their budgets, & I’m talking here in the views of an ordinary webmaster or a community builder. Small and medium webmasters are typically freelancers or small business people who want the resource and means to survive with their online community.
XOOPS already have every feature in building a powerful Online Community. And modules like forums, downloads, news and articles, RSS feeds, blogs, chat etc can attract any users if it is active with plenty of rich contents. But, my question is, do XOOPS have any module or module enhancements for making revenue and building a robust community?? Not much so far to be honest.
I’m not blaming Xoops. !!! Off course, some existing module features like pay and download, donation, membership category where premium membership (with paid subscription ), and running a shopping cart etc might get revenue for webmasters. Even banner advertisement and Google Adsense and other PPC integrations get revenues. I do know that there are plenty of successful XOOPS webmasters already who earns between 3000 to 20,000$ / month. But, it is an effort of their hardworking and establishment of ground operations.
So, a success of a site owner using XOOPS CMS core engine depends on, how far he build a strong and active online community. Multiplying our community user’s strength is the primary need, before we think of making revenues from our website.
Now, to build a successful community we need to consider the following concepts and module enhancements seriously.
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** Step 1: Building a feature rich community targeting an objective.
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1.a)We need a good CMS engine with strong content management (Xoops is one, and we have succeeded in this already)
1.b) Make the users (or community) active, interested and dedicated (This is not XOOPS team part, it is totally the webmasters or site owners part, he need to spend time to gather relevant articles, have a plan and objective, give what the users (or community is expecting, and should have the hypnotic approach to keep his users (community) with him for ever.
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** Step 2: Promoting & Strengthening the Community (user database building and keeping the community active)
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2.a)Advertise, Announce about the community and do primary campaigns (totally the site owners responsibility)
2.b)SEO Optimizing (XOOPS team should provide more features in this and support the site owners)
2.c)Referral System (A member referring another members with point or credit system earning – and webmaster can give gifts, cash returns, or premium membership based on his plans) – XOOPS team should consider this and can refer the referral system (even multi level scheme) as found in GPT websites (Get paid to Read, Get Paid to Click Websites) – We should remember that a member (or user) referring other members is the best channel to build a community, and provision to give incentives (in term of credits, points or cash) keep them active and community grows automatically.
2.d)Advanced Profile with Search System (It is where XOOPS fails, if we could add features like a dating or friendship site or a matrimonial modules (which can be enabled or disabled by admin area), then it make the users (or community) to be active. We do have friend finders etc already, but we are very behind a good community feature.
2.e)Community & Club Management Module: (It is an essential enhancement for the user profile) For Ex: A musical related website running on XOOPS might need proper grouping of members like , a member of so and so music band club or fan of so and so artist. An automotive website giving reviews on vehicle can categories the users based as owner of Volvo, or owner of Hardly Davidson etc. And this module is typical community and club management or ownership management and with category and subcategory features this is very essential for many modules listed in STEP 3 below.
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** Step 3: Utilizing the community (Making Revenue from our community)
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3.a)Advanced Banner Management (We do have a banner system already, and maybe many site owner would have already embed Google Adsense in their sites) – But XOOPS team should provide more features. Every site owners fail to realize that our community might have ordinary people, business owners, entrepreneurs, who would like to advertise their own product or services. So, a users (or members interface to add their own campaigns with payment options give extra revenue to the site owners. And more automated that is, the site owners can go for vacations and see his revenue adding up). We need not seek sponsors every time always. Who knows, some time our own users give us paid advertisements. Is it?.
3.b)Advanced Newsletter Management (With paid and non paid newsletter options) Further, the module (user profile) should have this default opt – in opt out features at the time of user registration.
3.c)Advanced Classified Features: A good module to make revenues for the site owners. (Ex. Limit the free classified to 2 or 3 advertisements & 1 picture per advertisement on a monthly or weekly basis. And premium advertisement with a revenue. (The feature should have an option to enable and disable premium advertisements, as some charity or religious communities using classified don’t like the idea of collecting money from the members for value added services like classifieds). With proper planning a structured and single classifieds module can be used for matrimonial, job site or real estates, buy and sell etc.
3.d)Advanced Auction Management: (with both end deals like business to consumer auction as in eBay.com and business to business trade auction as in alibaba.com). Further, this is a complicated section and time consuming if we focus on reverse auction, or specific to domain auctions.
3.e) Advanced Marketing Research: More than anything this is the module that can fetch REAL BIG $$$$. For Eg: If there is a XOOPS website focusing on automobiles or mobile phone users, and that community has 50,000 or 75,000 registered users. Then I swear and bet, with proper channels the site owner can earn million $$ in a year. Even standard surveys with good questionnaires fetch 2$ / survey from companies and with pipeline or branching survey features, an order of 2000 surveys from a mobile or automobile company at a rate of 5$ or 10$ will fetch him 10,000$ / order. Think big and you have the money in your pocket. And now, the question is, how to make our members or users (the community participate in such surveys), well it is where the need for GPT Module (the important module for success of a XOOPS site) arises.
3.f)GPT (Get Paid to) Module: Pay your members or users, per involvement , either that is Pay per Review / Pay per Campaign / Pay per Reading Email / Pay per Reading Subscriptions of Newsletters / Pay per Reading Click (Text & Banner links) / and Pay per Survey. If XOOPS integrate this module, I swear every pay per click and ppc engine script makers will shut their business, as there is no one to compete with XOOPs.
3.g)Advanced Profile Management: Though, I’ve listed this above (in Step 2: d), I would like to list this again, as it is module integerating with GPT, Marketing System, etc. Marketing Research, News letters, Online Campaigns etc depend on the parameters like geographical facts (country, state, city, zone) / gender, income class, job status, ownership (club management module listed above) etc. The opt-in and opt-out needed for the email campaign, newsletters, market research, GPT etc can be handled here.
Further, Extended Field Attribute System, in the admin area of this module to make a webmaster define his own database (text, numeric, logical, combo fields) will help the webmasters to customize their user’s profile. Every online community is focusing on certain classification of humans, diverse to different culture, living standards, age and gender and customization of profile in an advanced way is very important.
3.h)Ecommerce – We have already achieved a lot in this section. But, I do have few more suggestions that I can give later.
I could keep on listing these requirements. Online Coupons & Discount System / Affiliate Networks / Event Reservation Systems / Advanced SEO optimizers, etc But the issue here is not Ideas, any one could suggest requirements like as I do. But, we need powerful resource and team to build our dream modules. I know, it is easier to suggest, but hard implementing and all these modules are not Childs play.
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Step 4: Stability & Reliability of Our Online Community.
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4.a)Well parameters like good hosting, bandwidth, uptime, backup measures etc are the responsibility of the site owners. (So, XOOPS team cannot help you in your personal problems). But, spend your own time to learn about the necessary backup, restoration and database recovery methods discussing with other site owners and make sure you are secured with stability and security of your website.
4.b)Module Compatibility Issues: Have anyone reading our XOOPS support forum noticed, where a leading portion of the time and energies of XOOPS Management end with. Yes, you guessed right, with unwanted support requests, compatibility issues, diversified attentions etc. So, XOOPS site owners, please take the prior self testing in a dummy XOOPS core module (it is always recommended to run your own
4.c)Module Reliability & Trust. There are typically two types of modules a) Core Modules b) Hacks. As everyone knows, a hack of a popular script, especially like IPB M is very necessary. But, when a hack is version dependant, its updation should synchronize with the Core XOOPS version Release. And for each module concept, you find plenty of series (about 8 or 10 chat modules, about 5 or 6 forum modules, about 2 or 3 blog modules, about 5 or 6 news and article modules). The energy, time and efforts of nearly 80% site owners go in vain due to the lack of stable trust in a SPECIFIC module. Shuffling and switching between modules, and losing data and contents and seeking supports not only waste the site owners time, but also the core development process of the XOOPS Team.
To overcome this, XOOPS should adopt one good module from each sector as the official module of XOOPS and integrate with the core XOOPS Engine. Let people trying third party modules or hack do that at their own risk. And as XOOPS grows and newer version releases, let the official modules too grow with that with added features.
4.d)Review & Rating Panel: I’ve noticed that www.xoops.org have support forum, theme repository, module repository, and links, downloads etc. But don’t we miss a REVIEW & RATING SECTION. If so, it would help many new XOOPS users to finalize their standard modules and reduce the errors and cons.
We already have a wonderful Review & Rating Module (the one with Review Category features). So, every module (categorized as official modules, third party modules, and hacks, paid modules) should be listed for review with subcategories. I’m listing some of the sample category and review category below.
Some Review Category listing can be common for every product, as like (Integration Compatibly / Browser Compatibly / Features strength / Language Support / Error Free Status / Module updation Frequency / Trust & Reliability / User Manual / Theme Integration)
**Chat (Fastness / Layout & Design / Server Load optimizing / Multiple Room Features / Paid Membership Features)
**Themes (Layout & Design / CSS Support / PNG or PSD Template Bundle / Customization Features / Error Free Status)
**Games (Game Features / Fastness & Performance / User Popularity)
**Link Directory (Multi Category Features / Thumbnail Preview Option / etc)
An other feature, www.xoops.org misses with really now is Opinion & Poll to record and analyze the site owner’s feedback. Offcourse, that helps the entire team..
e) Security Issues: Protection from Spammers, Injectors, Hackers, Site Crashers, Virus etc should be considered. To start with, generating a Turing number or Turing image during registration, helps robotic or junk registrations (2 years back, I’d personally experienced such an attack with one of my community site, where I got 3000 junk registration from a single IP address, through a script controlled registration process, which I overcome adding Turing Number. (But, FYI even there is loop holes for Turing numbers so auto generated character displaying on temporary image, that is generated on the fly is recommended as Yahoo does now. )
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****Conclusion****
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Being owner of a successful online community means POWER and it is as stronger as Medias like newspaper or TV. There is saying “Online community of Consumers is a GOLDMINE”. More your community grows you have the resources to make money. And the advertisers, corporate and market research agencies, consumer good manufactures will be after us. If there is a XOOPS website focusing on Fashion & Lifestyle with 25,000 members, then a cosmetic or garment manufacturer prefers to advertise in this site getting the attention 100% targeted audience, rather than advertising in a newspaper with circulation 10 times than this site with 5 or 6% targeted audience. If that XOOPS site has its own GPT module, then that site owner can get plenty of advertisement campaign and make revenues.
Well, though not as a module, I have a suggestion for an Exclusive Site for XOOPS Management. Why doesn’t XOOPS Team come with own Ad servers? (Our own adservers like Google adserver). If 1000 of site webmasters using XOOPS websites integrates, then we are collectively generating a traffic spool of 300 million (1000 XOOPS website @ the rate of average 1000 page hits / day) page impressions per month. #OOPS#, the power of unity! And providing a lower rate advertisement to it members (with 1/5th rate of Google or Overture), XOOPS Management could easily make revenue to enrich its project development. I can suggest a good Ad Server Script ,
http://www.inclick.net/ (that is 100% free and very robust and feature rich, but ask a small proportion of our profit us, saying help us grow, as you grow)
If other webmasters and site owners feel these module enhancements listed in Step 1, 2 and 3 is necessary, then I’m ready to provide the project sketch, detailed list of project requirements, necessary system study and comparative analysis specification reports etc and the financial contribution to my own limits and ability to the XOOPs Management. I’m not a php programmer, but I can dedicate my time in non programming activities.
Actually I’m not listing any module request here, but saying, rather than module features, some emphasis should be given to the topics I discussed so far and if the response is good, we will work on these module enhancements that can easily make every webmasters using Xoops, a millionaire.
In my humble views, I feel XOOPs should take this article with importance as if ever, XOOPS Team can come with features that makes your depending webmasters (we are your children, and a part of Xoops, is it) turn successful in the long run of their community, then that is a success for the entire XOOPs team. If XOOPS team helps us to be successful and earn money using your CMS engine, then every webmasters will contribute a huge amount the XOOPS Management and working together ahead with future enhancements we all can grow together. Best of Luck! And Cheers for the Glory of XOOPS !!!
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Article Written by Jack on 25th, July, 2006
