How can you get traffic in addition to search engines and social websites traffic? I talk about big traffic, not a few visitors that you get from your website directory submissions or forum signatures.

Well, you can do it with your community - a database of dedicated users that will come to their favorite website for news, communication and more neglecting the positions of your website in search engines. You do not have to care about search engine updates anymore.

In addition to traffic the loyal visitors will generate you free content that will result in bringing you more visitors through search engines. The value of good communities is great

But the question is how to create these communities from zero? There are a few types of websites where users generate content:

- forums (most popular type)
- social websites (recent buzz on the Internet)
- image hosting
- etc

In this post I would like to talk about forums – the traditional way to generate users’ content and the cheapest one – it costs nothing to install phpBB forum on your website compared to developing a social website similar to www.digg.com

What issues should you be prepared to deal with if you are going to start your first forum? If you check the most authoritative web resource on this topic TheAdminZone you will see the tasks that are in store for you:

Set Up and Launch
Discussions about Planning an Online Community - Privacy Policies - Terms of Service - Targeting Niche - Demographics.

Community Management
Managing Members and Staff - Building Community Spirit.

Servers and Hosting
Shared, Virtual, and Dedicated Hosting Options.

Search Engine Optimization
SEO Makes Your Forums Irresistable To Spiders! Techniques and Tips For vBulletin, IPB, and phpBB. Increase Your Forum’s Search Engine Rankings.

Increasing Traffic
Promotional Techniques To Fill Up Those Member Lists.

Advertising Methods
Offsetting the Cost of Maintaining Your Site with Affiliate Programs, eCommerce, Subscriptions, Donations, Advertising, and Targeted Sponsorships - Online Payment Options

Forum Organization
How To Arrange Your Forums For Best Effect.

Graphics Customization
Advice & Tutorials for forum styles. Buttons, smilies, avatar swaps. (Add forum software brand to the title of your thread)

Recently I have started 4 forums. Considering my experience short of successful running online communities I have to learn much and fast. At the moment I try to find a working algorithm to apply to all my forums, but I have a gut feeling that there is no unique solution for every community as they are all in different niches.

As I go deeper into the mechanism of forum operation I start to look at my websites with the eyes of a visitor and see more and more things to improve (then I drop my forum research and do some work at the websites).

I have chosen free phpBB software for my websites though most ‘experienced’ people recommend vBulletin. I have installed several and plan to add a few more mods (attachment, reputation, etc)

Well, what resources are likely to help you with your endeavors to start, manage and promote your online communities?

In addition to TheAdminZone (where you can also find interviews with successful forum owners) I would recommend AdminFusion (I guess Lee Dodd - a well known ‘forum specialist’ - is the owner of this one)

And spend a portion of your valuable time studying these invaluable pieces of wisdom:

Set-up & Launch Resources

Community Management Resources

Increasing Traffic Resources

The best tips to get your forum started

Advertising Method Resources

Summary: Yes, it takes time to explore the resources I refer to in this post. It will take time to implement most steps on your forums to achieve any good result. It will be hard to compete with a lot of other forums in your niche – some innovating ideas would help with that.

But if and when you and I succeed we will enjoy an automatic online property that will take minimum time and efforts (compared to running a blog or a content website) to run.

[tags]user generated content, forums, free, phpbb, vbulletin, link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, archive.org, adsense, adwords, ppc, text-link-ads, links buying, links selling, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, ebay, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, wikipedia, del.icio.us, technorati, bloglines, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]

With such a powerful tool as Link Baiting why to bother with searching for any links to your website, adding it to article and general directories, spending money on buying links? Forget about it, get one way natural links that will push your website to the top of search engines and social websites.

So, with link baiting all you need is to create some great content or an online tool, post it on social bookmarking websites: enjoy traffic and generate income.

Social bookmarking – you save your bookmarks to some public website that makes your bookmarks available to other members. You also tag your bookmarks with keywords – relatively new way of information classification. This website members search the information by tags, popularity or person.

Unfortunately, it is not so easy. But let’s start from the beginning.

Rand Fishkin defines link baiting as content targeting link friendly audiences. Very precise definition. Link friendly audiences – who are they? Bloggers and forum posters.

Rand who is one of the best link baiters offers his algorithm to succeed with this marketing technique:

1. Browse popular social bookmarking websites (del.icio.us, digg.com, stumbleupon.com, netscape.com, etc) and research what people tend to bookmark in your niche.

2. Brainstorm for 10-15 ideas for content or tools. They should be unique and appealing to your niche users. It is the hardest part: how to know that this information will appeal to link friendly audience? Answer: by trial and error

3. Develop a catchy title

4. Add web 2.0 look and feel features

5. Remember to add viral elements: ‘e-mail your friend’, ‘add to a bookmarking website’

6. Test if everything is fine and add the link bait to social bookmarking websites (list of most popular social bookmarking websites)

7. Be prepared: not every piece of your work is likely to become a true link bait. Also expect some criticism from community – there will be some persons who are likely to discover some weak points in your work.

I have been testing the algorithm for a few days. I did not make it really big, but a simple post ‘where to buy domain names’ brought me alone about 1,000 unique visitors a day. It is a record for my website. The visitors neither clicked AdSense ads nor were interested to buy any products/ services displayed at the website, but it is great from branding point of view. And it is time to turn to ‘old and good’ CPM advertising (CPM - banner impressions).

Summary: I have really experienced the power of bookmarking websites: they bring you traffic, generate new links (not yet any evidence in my case), a great branding tool. They make you less dependent on natural search engine traffic. And it is the greatest advantage to new websites that endlessly complain of Google sandbox.

It is not that simple to create a working link bait, but it is a much easier task than to get your website to Google top 10.

[tags]link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, archive.org, adsense, adwords, ppc, text-link-ads, links buying, links selling, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, news aggregator, ebay, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, wikipedia, del.icio.us, technorati, bloglines, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]

Probably I should have posted this article first (and these two should follow: How to sell / buy websites and Where to sell / buy websites).

Why should you bother buy old websites when you can develop your own and you enjoy the entire process? I think Jim Boykin was very straightforward with his explanation why you should buy old sites: Screw the Sandbox

Read the post and you will discover that he bought 5 sites in 5 days. The websites were registered in the 90’s and early 2000’s. He wrote to about 50 people after digging whois. The post was published on his blog on November 6th, 2005:

Site 1: A stricly informational site registered in 1996, over 70k backlinks, over 650 backlinks from EDU’s.
Site 2: An informational website registered in 1995, over 1k backlinks in yahoo, 6 from .edu’s.
Site 3: Site registed in 2001, ~1500 yahoo backlinks, 6 baclinks from edu’s.
Site 4: Site registed in early 2004, ~50 backlinks. (ranks in the top 20 google)
Site 5: Site registered in late 2003, ~50 backlinks. (#7 yahoo)

The most interesting part of the story is his post on the same topic published on April 8th, 2006. Jim writes about his investment:

…well to be honest, they’re [the websites he bought] doing quite well….one made ~8k last month, another made ~5k last month, another I turned right around and sold it for a price that made me over 8k instantly in profit, another made about $300 last month, and the other I haven’t changed yet as it took a few months to finally get the ownership changed and since the whois changed, I haven’t touched the site yet (I’ll wait a few months to do anything if the whois changed).

….yes…they were very profitable and I should make ~$150k from those sites over the course of a year….total spent for those 5 sites was less than $20k…..not a bad profit margin.

I think it is a good answer why you should be interested in the old websites and keep an eye on all those website sale offerings that are regularly posted online.

Jim Boykin’s favorite tools – he listed them in one of his interviews (despite the fact that he says he uses his own private tool to detect websites with good income potential there is a high probability that it consists of a combination of his favorite tools):

Wayback Machine
Find Age of Website Tool
Poodle Predictor
Copyscape
URLinfo
Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer
KwMap
Hubfinder
Keyword Tracker

Summary: It is a great sample of ‘knowledge is power’. And it is not a secret that other well known webmasters and seo’s buy old websites (for example, Aaron Wall).

[tags]why to buy old websites, where to sell websites, domain names, archive.org, , adsense, adwords, ppc, text-link-ads, links buying, links selling, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs,  content generation,  news aggregator,  ebay,  google,  make money online,  work from home,  home based job,  wikipedia,  del.icio.us,  technorati,  bloglines,  duplicate content,  links,  earn your living online[/tags]