Chris
04-26-2007, 08:01 PM
I have to say, running your own forum (http://www.talkcomedy.net) is awesome. I have learned so much in just one day... about vBulletin, about scripting/coding and designing, and about advertising and optimizing. Well, here's my story....
As you know, I got the idea for a forum about comedy some time ago. Thanks to the encouragement from FU staff, I decided to go for it. Well, very early yesterday morning I got sick of waiting and just decided to go for it. Now, when I go for things I go the whole way. I didn't want to get my feet wet, I dove headfirst. I bought an owned vB license, bought two forum styles from vBskinworks (a Christian company, so I was happy to support them), and sat down with a ton of time on my hands. The forum was initially installed with a style I wasn't happy with, so I switched to the other style. I wanted to customize the logo so I learned a lot about slicing designs from playing around with PhotoShop. I installed fun addons like the arcade and other things, and got everything ready to go.
Next came getting my first members. I knew some friends who were interested in the concept, so I invited them to participate. Then I created a group on Facebook (college-level social networking site) and invited a ton of my friends, basically saying "Hey, I started a new project... come support me!". That worked a little, but what really got the guests showing up was adding a link to forum signatures (particularly my WHT sig). I manually submitted the site to Yahoo, Google and MSN. Google's bots have already hit the site. Next I'm trying to find a free service that mass-submits to directories and other things to help get some incoming links.
The forum is still very small, but I don't think we've done pretty good for about 20 hours of being open...
Members: 10
Threads: 17
Posts: 35
Online: 3
Total guests that have visited the forum in the last 24 hours: 42
Visitors (41), Google Spiders (1)
My goal is to hit 50 members in 30 days from today. I'll keep you guys posted :)
As you know, I got the idea for a forum about comedy some time ago. Thanks to the encouragement from FU staff, I decided to go for it. Well, very early yesterday morning I got sick of waiting and just decided to go for it. Now, when I go for things I go the whole way. I didn't want to get my feet wet, I dove headfirst. I bought an owned vB license, bought two forum styles from vBskinworks (a Christian company, so I was happy to support them), and sat down with a ton of time on my hands. The forum was initially installed with a style I wasn't happy with, so I switched to the other style. I wanted to customize the logo so I learned a lot about slicing designs from playing around with PhotoShop. I installed fun addons like the arcade and other things, and got everything ready to go.
Next came getting my first members. I knew some friends who were interested in the concept, so I invited them to participate. Then I created a group on Facebook (college-level social networking site) and invited a ton of my friends, basically saying "Hey, I started a new project... come support me!". That worked a little, but what really got the guests showing up was adding a link to forum signatures (particularly my WHT sig). I manually submitted the site to Yahoo, Google and MSN. Google's bots have already hit the site. Next I'm trying to find a free service that mass-submits to directories and other things to help get some incoming links.
The forum is still very small, but I don't think we've done pretty good for about 20 hours of being open...
Members: 10
Threads: 17
Posts: 35
Online: 3
Total guests that have visited the forum in the last 24 hours: 42
Visitors (41), Google Spiders (1)
My goal is to hit 50 members in 30 days from today. I'll keep you guys posted :)