Growing Your Board (tip)

Author	Comment
support	Growing Your Board (tip)		Lead	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 15 25-Jan-09 18:24:06	Tags : promote, advertise, tips, signature, grow, profile These tips were originally posted at the old ezboard Public Community Showcase and modified for yuku. ezDollar In response to many members who have asked how they can get and keep members, this collection of suggestions has been compiled from many sources. Many thanks for the feedback from ezboard members and moderators that helped make up the list of suggestions. Special thanks to the following Public Community Showcase members (in alphabetical order) : Acapella bunniefuu \|\|Crimson Glow\|\| General Ceel knockitdown Lady Melanthe M Club President prettyeyesnads Rikali Sudsy Bubblebath SUZANNE1 Tien2500 TK624 waynemanor23 Last Edited By: Kathy 17-Jun-09 17:39:39. Edited 3 times.
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Kathy	Set goals	#1	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 13 25-Jan-09 18:13:39	If you do not set a goal your site will never be a success because you have nothing to reach for. ~General Ceel~ If this sounds too discouraging, remember that there are 2 different types of goals: Goals to meet -- These are things that must be done by a specific date or time. Goals to work toward -- These goals are goals you will work toward constantly until they are met. You set them by saying, "The next thing I want to accomplish is..." then you keep trying to accomplish it, whether it takes a minute, a day, a year, or the rest of your life. With this type of goal, you only fail if you stop trying. Decide how you're going to define "success." If you have a small community with a handful of faithful, friendly, funny, loyal, supportive members, is that success? Does a community with 1,000 members and 60,000 posts equal success for you? Decide in advance what you really want, and be content with it once you get it. Last Edited By: support 25-Jan-09 18:26:27. Edited 5 times.
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Kathy	Diversify	#2	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 14 25-Jan-09 18:17:38	If your area of interest is narrow, don't devote the entire board to it. The chances are small that you will find lots of other Yuku members who have enough interest in the weather in Costa Rica, or macaroni art, or playing the oboe, to post about it day after day, as faithful members of your board. Your board will usually be more successful if your area of special interest is secondary to a theme of more general interest. If there are already 200 boards about Pokemon (for example), don't start another one. Make your board be about something else and include a forum for Pokemon discussion to please yourself.
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Kathy	Post your board's rules	#3	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 15 25-Jan-09 18:18:29	Begin with a short list of basic rules. You can always add a rule, later, if you need to. Apply the rules to all members equally and fairly. If you make an exception for someone, make sure that person, and all your members, understand it is an exception made for a good reason. If you have moderators, make sure they understand your rules and how to apply and explain them to members. When they enforce your board's policies, support them. If there are no rules, post that too.
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Kathy	Make new members feel welcome	#4	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 16 25-Jan-09 18:20:20	Provide an "Introduce Yourself" or "Welcome New Members" type of forum so they know where they're expected to begin posting at your board. Make sure any new member's post is replied to as soon as possible. Treat others the way you would like to be treated. Treat your members as if they are guests in your home (which also means expecting them to follow your rules).
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Kathy	Promote your board	#5	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 17 25-Jan-09 18:23:06	NEVER spam, no one respects a spammer. ~knockitdown~ You have to think of promotion as a lot of little efforts over a sustained period of time. ~SUZANNE1~ Post at other Yuku communities. Follow the other board's posted rules. Advertise once, in the correct forum only. If there is no specific forum for advertising, post a few times without your signature before you advertise or use a signature that doesn't mention your board. Look around. See what others do on the board, and follow their lead. In other words, become a member in good standing at the board before you issue a friendly invitation for other members to visit your board. Use your custom signature Don't use a custom signature that contains large images, long text passages, crude language, or that contains any kind of code that might slow down the loading of the thread or that some browsers won't even see (e.g. marquee). Ask your members to put a text link or button for your board in their Custom Signature. Choose members you know you can trust to be on good behavior. Keep the text or button small and stylish, so it offends no one but still attracts attention. Use your Profile. With Yuku, you have more options on using your profile to advertise your board. You can use the links box or any of the html blocks to provide links to your board or you can use images. You can see some examples in my profile. Another great example is Arizona's profile. Affiliate: Invite other board owners to post a link or button on your board, in exchange for letting you advertise on their board. You could do this by having a forum just for advertising or by using one of the scripts from the script library to create a drop menu or box. Build a partner website. If your board is about soccer (for example), build a website about your favorite players or team, or about the history of the World Cup. If it's about cooking, build a website about your favorite TV chefs, or funny stories about your mom's kitchen disasters, or something else associated with your board. Your Yuku community can be used as a guest book, or as a place to collect feedback or post "further information." Submit your Yuku community and your website (if you have one) to at least one search engine. Add tags to your board so web crawlers will know how to place it and how often to visit it. (For helpful information about using search engines to your best advantage, see topics posted in this forum) Remember, word-of-mouth advertising is some of the best free advertising any business (and any Yuku) can have. If your board's reputation is bad, the word will get around. If it's a great place to post, word of that will get around, too. If your board is a local interest board, you can talk to potential new members face to face. For my board (for the local minor league hockey team) I used my computer to make business cards with the url to my board and I made fliers to be placed on the table for the booster club. Last Edited By: Kathy 25-Jan-09 19:45:35. Edited 1 time.
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Kathy	Don't promote your board until it's ready	#6	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 18 25-Jan-09 18:43:06	Don't let your excitement override your good judgment. Wait until you're a little familiar with how a Yuku board works. Wait until you have some basic forums and customization set up. (When you're ready to do more advanced customization, visit the Design forums at Support.) Post some topics at your board before you invite people to come to it. Give them something they might want to reply to, to comment on -- a joke, a poll, a serious topic for discussion, a piece of your artwork, etc. One tip that I learned at ezboard, that I wished I had known when I started my first board, is to avoid having all the posts on the board be by you. Some people won't post at a board where it looks there is just the board owner. If you have a friend who can help, have them start some topics and reply to the ones that you start. The tip from ezboard was to create a couple of additional accounts and make some posts with the other names. On yuku this is much easier, as each account can have up to 5 profiles on it (Supporters can have up to 10). The trick is to not get ridiculous with posting with the different names. Don't start fights with yourself. You may find that you like using different profiles for different things. For example, you may want to use the support account that comes with the board for posting rules, giving warnings or banning people. Then use one of your names as the "official" name that you use for announcements etc and save another name for regular posting. Last Edited By: Kathy 14-Aug-09 15:06:57. Edited 2 times.
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Kathy	Be honest when you advertise, and be honest with your members	#7	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 19 25-Jan-09 18:50:13	Be the kind of person that you want to attract to your board.... Your own attitude has a tremendous amount of influence ~SarahStar~ Keep your promises. Don't exaggerate. Be yourself. Don't play practical jokes. They can easily be misunderstood in cyberspace, where you can't be seen or heard. Follow the Golden Rule: Treat others as you would have them treat you.
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Kathy	Choose a design that YOU like.	#8	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 20 25-Jan-09 18:56:24	You can't please everyone, so don't try. You should spend a lot of time at the board, so make sure you like to look at it. You want your members to be happy, too, but, if they ask you to make the board green, don't make it green if you hate green.
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Kathy	Give your time -- don't be an absentee owner	#9	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 21 25-Jan-09 19:04:21	Do as much of the board layout/design as you can. Greet new members personally; answer as many posts as you can at all times. Take time to post your own topics and polls. Don't leave the running of your board to administrators/moderators only. If a day goes by in which no one posts at your board, it's up to YOU to post something and make the board continue to look welcoming and "lived in." Take time to e-mail your members personally. It can be a little "Hello" message or a more detailed "newsletter." Write it yourself, don't have an admin or mod do it. Send it no more often than once a month, to avoid having your members feeling that you are spamming them. Later on, you may want to reduce the emails to once or twice a year, if that works better for your community. If things change in the future where you no longer have the time to devote to your board, consider transfering ownership to a trusted admin. To transfer ownership, you will need to open a Help Ticket.
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Kathy	Follow the LESS IS MORE rule...	#10	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 22 25-Jan-09 19:05:57	...at least to begin with. Keep special effects to a minimum. If you have a banner, keep it small enough that no one will have to scroll to see it all. Have the smallest possible number of forums. Building your board is like adding salt to a dish of food. You can always add a more, but, once you've added it, it's a lot more tricky to take it out. As your board grows, you can add more effects and forums.
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Kathy	Avoid extreme special effects	#11	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 23 25-Jan-09 19:13:04	Avoid combinations of marquees, tickers, scripts, large Flash/Swish files, music, and other add-ons that will slow down the loading time of your board. Don't assume everyone who visits your board will have a fast broadband connection. There are users who only have dial up available to them. Some of your potential members may be on restricted systems, such as at work or at the library, where the system administrator has disallowed sound, graphics, and other special effects. Make your board look good without resorting to effects that members may not be able to see or hear. Back when I could access my board from work, most of the graphics were blocked, so I made sure that I had a background color behind the background image so that the page looked good and that text and links were readable. What works in one browser may not work in another. What works on a PC may not work on a Mac, or on WebTV. Keep fancy scripts and effects to a minimum to make your board appeal and be user friendly to the largest number of potential members. If you add affiliate ads with websites, be sure that they don't cause pop ups or a program or plug-in of any kind to try to download to your prospective member's computer.
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Kathy	Encourage your members to play a part in running the community	#12	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 24 25-Jan-09 19:16:50	Use polls to get feedback on decisions that affect the entire community. Notify the community about coming design changes, theme changes, etc. Give members a chance to offer opinions and ask questions. Respond to members' complaints and suggestions with patience and courtesy. There may be times when you have to type out a scathing reply to a post and then delete it, in order to be able reply diplomatically.
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Kathy	Security	#13	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 25 25-Jan-09 19:21:14	Don't turn on MBA (Membership By Approval) at the beginning. Yes, you may get some visitors you don't want, but most of them will be easily dealt with. Too many potential members simply won't bother to apply if they can't read your board first, and see what kind of community you have. As the board grows, you can add some private forums for your active members or sensitive discussions. Don't worry about "lurkers.". Some people -- perfectly nice, innocent, intelligent, well intentioned people -- like to read the posts at a board for a few days or even weeks before they decide to join in. Some are too shy to post but enjoy reading. They mean you no harm. Don't grant Administrator or Moderator positions to people you don't know. Don't offer those powers as a premium for joining your board. An Administrator gone bad can completely wipe out your board. A Moderator gone bad can wipe out the contents of any forum in which he/she has power. A bad moderator or administrator hurts your board's reputation. Fortunately on Yuku a rogue mod/admin isn't as devastating as it was on ezboard. You can view the community log in your control panel and restore deleted posts/topics/forums.
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Kathy	Make your community Gold...	#14	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 26 25-Jan-09 19:34:52	...if you can, and do it as soon as you can. Many free boards are very successful because they are so good that no amount of advertisements will keep the members away but the job of making your board a success will be easier if your board is Gold. You may only be able to afford to make your board gold for a few months or for the first year, but it may be enough to get the board established. Prior to gold running out, you can ask your members to help keep the board gold or to purchase Supporter for themselves.
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Kathy	Mind your Ps and Qs	#15	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 27 25-Jan-09 19:38:54	Use whatever slang or abbreviations you like in your chat posting, but in your board design (forum names and descriptions, posted rules and announcements, instructions for registering, etc.), in your e-mails to members, and in your advertising and promotion, use your very best grammar, sentence structure, and spelling. Many people will be driven away by sloppy spelling, but few will be driven away by good spelling. If grammar and spelling aren't your strong point, use a dictionary and/or ask someone who's better at it than you are to help "proofread" your board and advertisements. Most browser now, have good spelling checkers and there is a Yuku spell check button on both the wysiwyg and bbcode editors. Simple courtesies like saying "Please," "Thank you," and "You're welcome" will help you make -- and keep -- a good first, and lasting, impression. Make sure your admins and mods understand that they represent your board, even when they post somewhere else. If they have a reputation for sloppy, rude posting, you may get that same reputation because they work for you.
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Kathy	Find an expert	#16	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 28 25-Jan-09 19:40:20	Be an expert on whatever subject is the theme of your board. If you're not an expert on your board's theme, find someone who is. For example... if your board is about flying, try to get a licensed pilot to come and answer questions at your board. If you're going to have a Bible-study board, try to get a minister or lay worker from your church to come to the board, answer questions, and give a new perspective. If your board is about horses, invite a professional trainer or Olympic hopeful to come and answer questions about the subject.
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Kathy	Be Patient, Be Persisent	#17	[url]	[-]
Promote Administrator Participant Posts: 29 25-Jan-09 19:42:34	Some board owners have reported that it's taken them as long as 6 months to reach what they feel is success for their board. With my board it was 18 months before things really got going. For many users, posting is seasonal or depends on other conditions being right. Some people have access to a computer only during the school term. Others just the opposite -- they can post from home but not from school (or work). Some people have time to post only when the weather is bad and they're stuck indoors. If your board is created in the summertime and starts off slowly, it may grow unexpectedly during the snow season -- or you may find posting is slow during school times but picks up during holidays. Don't expect dozens of members to flock to your board the first day, or even the first week. The word has to get out, first.
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