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1
Jackwan
How do you get visitors to Post?

  • 2004/11/2 6:26

  • Jackwan

  • Not too shy to talk

  • Posts: 129

  • Since: 2004/9/8 2


I installed xoops. I installed the modules. Its all running fine. 20 visitors a day(report from Istat), great! Topics of interest, check. Web Contents - very professionally done. What more do I have to do to lead visitors to register and post in the forum? I'd like to know from those are successful in running a forum your thoughts.

A lot of work has been done to upgrade the contents of my site:
1. Carefully crafted forums.
2. Primed with good topics.
3. Daily National News Feed from Google.
4. Links to all other professional sites.
5. Registration incentives.
6. Web promotion on all major search engines.
7. Email Advertising
8. Printed media ads (no results).

Help me.

Thanks.
2
Herko
Re:How do you get visitors to Post?

  • 2004/11/2 8:01

  • Herko

  • XOOPS is my life!

  • Posts: 4238

  • Since: 2002/2/4 1


WHoa.. that's like asking for a businesscase for your site. IMO that's what you should start with before you set up a site. However, here's some tips:

1. organise! Use the forum as a platform for organised discussions with experts, that last for a limited time (one day?).
2. don't just facilitate, but initiate! Don't present your visitors with a forum and topics to discuss, but initiate discussions with controversial posts and opinioned articles. People aren't driving because there are roads, but because they need to go somewhere...
3. activate! invite specific people to join in a specific discussin because of their (expert) opinions. You can also ask other organisations to initiate a discussion on your forums and ask them to invite their network.

These are just 3 tips from my experience. It works, but you have to work hard for this.

Herko
3
tedsmith
Re:How do you get visitors to Post?

  • 2004/11/2 10:47

  • tedsmith

  • Home away from home

  • Posts: 1151

  • Since: 2004/6/2 1


I have raised this question before too. I think the issue of forums creeps into this topic somewhere :

https://xoops.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=26229&forum=3&post_id=114657#forumpost114657

What I have learnt however, is be careful what controversial topic you choose. I chose Fox Hunting, and although I got a lot of anti-hunters making comment, I quickly got stunned by hundreds of pro-hunters and got quite a lot of abuse about it. This was especially true when I tried to rally support for my site using other dog related sites, but of course many of these people are themselves for fox hunting (becuase of 'working dogs', etc) and I was rapidly expelled from forums and such just for raising the topic. Suffice to say I have now had to remove it to avoid the political onslaught.

What I will say however is that it does a good job of driving traffic to your site. In my case, its no good to have people arguing and slagging people off - its a charity site after all. I don't know what your site is all about, but if you can afford the banter, then go for a controversial topic!

One other tip - like Herko says, post your own thoughts and comments for others to comment on. But in additiona, rally fellow Xoopers to register on your site and post a few questions themselves. That's what I did and the community responded.

Good Luck
4
Jackwan
Re:How do you get visitors to Post?

  • 2004/11/2 15:02

  • Jackwan

  • Not too shy to talk

  • Posts: 129

  • Since: 2004/9/8 2


Quote:

Herko Coomans wrote:
WHoa.. that's like asking for a businesscase for your site. IMO that's what you should start with before you set up a site. However, here's some tips:

1. organise! Use the forum as a platform for organised discussions with experts, that last for a limited time (one day?).
2. don't just facilitate, but initiate! Don't present your visitors with a forum and topics to discuss, but initiate discussions with controversial posts and opinioned articles. People aren't driving because there are roads, but because they need to go somewhere...
3. activate! invite specific people to join in a specific discussin because of their (expert) opinions. You can also ask other organisations to initiate a discussion on your forums and ask them to invite their network.

These are just 3 tips from my experience. It works, but you have to work hard for this.

Herko


Thanks,
To reply your thoughts Herko, I have done the followings, if that is close to what you have suggested.

1. I go to lots of professional meetings and I had personally solicit people to post on my site.
2. I have initialed 50 topics on my site, some are controversial, its true, controversial topics gets more attention(view), but still not enough participation(post).
3. I have done that. But people in my field they prefer not to discuss openly online, they want phone calls instead.

In addition, I have joined google adwords, I did not spend a high per click $ amount because that will cost me $100+++/day. My thoughts are: If I can get Googles to deep spider my site quicker, perhaps I can get some traffic if the contents are exposed.

One thing I did to make my site more visible is to post advertising on the Newsgroups, it did work but at the cost of receive warnings from my ISP saying I was spamming.

Media campaign was done via fliers. In a local chamber of commerce, I included my flier to their monthly publication, but nothing happened.

I even started a FAX campaign, I sent out 500-1000 faxes. The results were not productive, I did get about 10 removal calls, nevertheless.

Any more suggestions?
5
JMorris
Re:How do you get visitors to Post?

  • 2004/11/2 15:30

  • JMorris

  • XOOPS is my life!

  • Posts: 2722

  • Since: 2004/4/11


Jackwan,

First, let me say you have a nice site with some great content. However, there are a few things that caugh my eye.

Under "Links From Webmaster": "List of Main Links" opens a dull white page of links. You could easily "wrap" this static page of links so that it maintains a more consistant look with the rest of your site. Simply download "Mypage" from JackJ's site (link:http://macambridge.com/mypage.zip), open index.php in a text editor and replace "Your HTML here" with everyting between the body tags from your "List of Main Links" page.

Next, The big, glossy buttons at the top of the page really detract from the professional look and feel of your site and they are a bit confusing at a glance. Perhaps you could consider using graphics that match the colors of your site and are more 2 demensional. Also, smaller would be better.

Quote:
I have done that. But people in my field they prefer not to discuss openly online, they want phone calls instead.


Simple solution.... Talk with these individuals and find out what topics they would prefer to discuss in private. When you've gathered the general consensus, make those forum topics private for only a specific group. Just create a group named "Pros", or whatever, and change the access permissions under the newbb controls to only allow view and post by that group.

I hope you don't mind the constructive criticism. It's meant to help.

Best Regards,

JMorris
6
Jackwan
Re:How do you get visitors to Post?

  • 2004/11/2 17:28

  • Jackwan

  • Not too shy to talk

  • Posts: 129

  • Since: 2004/9/8 2


Thanks JM,

I will try to implement your suggestions.
I did however downloaded mypage.zip as you told me and installed on to the test environment. I am not sure how to invoke mypage and when I pointed that to the index.php it did not work. The subdirectory resolved to another variable in php debug. I did however change the version.php to point to the right subdirectories.
7
carnuke
Re:How do you get visitors to Post?

  • 2004/11/2 17:29

  • carnuke

  • Home away from home

  • Posts: 1955

  • Since: 2003/11/5


Jackwan, its only a simple addition but make your signature here a clickable link to your site. I have had several hundred visitors from XOOPS forums as my referes.

Link popularity is an important factor according to Google. Get your site URL on websites that get crawled regularly and are relevant to your content. Some SE sites are crawled each day by Google.

Change/ update/ renew your content often. This is also beneficila to S/Es like Google

Submit a page to google that has keywords relavant to top news stories in world news. I did this and had a huge hit rate in 2 days.
8
JMorris
Re:How do you get visitors to Post?

  • 2004/11/2 19:23

  • JMorris

  • XOOPS is my life!

  • Posts: 2722

  • Since: 2004/4/11


Quote:

Jackwan wrote:
Thanks JM,

I will try to implement your suggestions.
I did however downloaded mypage.zip as you told me and installed on to the test environment. I am not sure how to invoke mypage and when I pointed that to the index.php it did not work. The subdirectory resolved to another variable in php debug. I did however change the version.php to point to the right subdirectories.


It would have taken longer to explain than to do, so I put the module together for you. You can download it at the following link:

http://s89862630.onlinehome.us/mwa/downloads/mainlinks.zip

All I did was copy everything between the <body></body> tags and removed all the unnecessary Microsoft code. It's rather plain, but it works perfectly. Install the module like any other module. It will automatically register itself in the main menu. If you don't want it to show up in the main menu, just set the Order to 0 under Modules Administration. Also, don't forget to update your group permissions so anonymous can access the module. Then you can reference the page url with the following:

http://creforum.net/modules/mainlinks/index.php

Check out the code in the xoops_version.php and index.php to see how it was done.

If you'd like to see a decent example of how flexible the mypage module can make your site, visit the site in my signature. Every page on that site uses mypage and strategic block placement. That's all.

Hope this helps.
9
Jackwan
Re:How do you get visitors to Post?

  • 2004/11/4 16:01

  • Jackwan

  • Not too shy to talk

  • Posts: 129

  • Since: 2004/9/8 2


Hi JM,

What is the purpose of put the htmls into mypage? I have done what you said and now I am getting this error

I used your index.php

invocation of :
http://credata.creforum.info/modules/mainlink/

results:

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /home/twkinc/public_html/credata/header.php on line 112

Here is my xoops_version.php, "mainlink" is where I installed the mypage files:

<?php
$modversion['name'] = "Main Links";//mainlink
$modversion['version'] = 1.01;
$modversion['description'] = "Static Main Links Page";
$modversion['author'] = "";
$modversion['credits'] = "";
$modversion['help'] = "";
$modversion['license'] = "GPL see LICENSE";
$modversion['official'] = 0;
$modversion['image'] = "admin.png";
$modversion['dirname'] = "mainlinks";//mainlink

// Admin things
$modversion['hasAdmin'] = 0;
$modversion['adminpath'] = "";


// Menu

// Menu for submenus in main menu when page loads
$modversion['hasMain'] = 0;//0 to remove from main menu
// $modversion['sub'][1]['name'] = _MI_MYPAGE_SMNAME1;//define in language/english/global.php
// $modversion['sub'][1]['url'] = "../../modules/ipboard/";
// $modversion['sub'][2]['name'] = _MI_MYPAGE_SMNAME2;//define in language/english/global.php
// $modversion['sub'][2]['url'] = "../../modules/weblog/";


?>


Sorry, not an php programmer. note: creforum.info is my test site.

Thanks.
10
JMorris
Re:How do you get visitors to Post?

  • 2004/11/4 16:12

  • JMorris

  • XOOPS is my life!

  • Posts: 2722

  • Since: 2004/4/11


Simple problem, simple solution. You're calling the mainlinks page from the "mainlink" directory instead of "mainlinks". If you want the directory to be called "mainlink", just edit xoops_version.php so the the 'dirname' matches the name of the directory where you want your files stored. See below.

Quote:
$modversion['dirname'] = "mainlink";//mainlink


This will enable you to call the module from the follwoing url.

http://credata.creforum.info/modules/mainlink/

You must have changed some things aroud before you uploaded the files becasue, as it was, all you had to do was upload the module and install it and it would have given you the desired result.

The html in index.php is your links. Just copied, pasted, and cleaned.

Hope this helps.
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