I may be an old hand at building sites, but not at marketing them. Now that I'm doing the promos for me, I'm working on learning the ropes. 
I run a low carb support community.
I run a low carb support community.
Welcome Headers are Helping
Posted 03-05-2008 at 10:29 PM by goddess_dix
After installing the welcome headers mod the other day (and a great big, honkin' googlead next to my image header for guests), I'm ancedotally noticing some differences.
I did customize the messages for my userbase; my community is basically known for friendliness and supportivenss, so that's the tone I looked to hit and I think I was reasonably successful.
Linking to the intro forum in the "you haven't posted yet" message especially seem to encourage folks to post their intros. That's helpful for us in managing what's going on as it gives a sense of who's there and what their knowledgebase is. I often choose to feature different content on the home page based on what we have going on in the forums.
Signups are steady at about 4-8 a day, which is up a bit from our average of 2 or 3 a day. Not a ton by any means, but slow, steady growth which is enough for me now.
Traffic, likewise, is slowly and steadily climbing. I'm running back up to about 650 uniques a day, about 65% from SE.
Got my recipes imported but not published yet as every single one will have to be edited and cleaned up. I've got about 700 or so to do. Ugh. But this is a major source of my SE traffic and contributes a lot to the usefulness of the site, so I need to keep focused on it.
BIG on the to-do list: Optimize my adsense in the content. I've got it, but it's performing very poorly. Also, get my tracking better set so I know what's making me money and what's total dead weight.
Looking at the possibility of offering paid subs at some point. Right now, the only think I know I'll offer in this case is ad-free, for the whole site. That makes sense to me, if they're supporting the site through the subs.
I should be able to check who's clicking the ads through my tracking tools to see how much of it is from members anyway. I'm betting with my membership and the topic of the site, most of my clicks are guests.
Anyway, that's today's random adventures in marketing.
I did customize the messages for my userbase; my community is basically known for friendliness and supportivenss, so that's the tone I looked to hit and I think I was reasonably successful.
Linking to the intro forum in the "you haven't posted yet" message especially seem to encourage folks to post their intros. That's helpful for us in managing what's going on as it gives a sense of who's there and what their knowledgebase is. I often choose to feature different content on the home page based on what we have going on in the forums.
Signups are steady at about 4-8 a day, which is up a bit from our average of 2 or 3 a day. Not a ton by any means, but slow, steady growth which is enough for me now.
Traffic, likewise, is slowly and steadily climbing. I'm running back up to about 650 uniques a day, about 65% from SE.
Got my recipes imported but not published yet as every single one will have to be edited and cleaned up. I've got about 700 or so to do. Ugh. But this is a major source of my SE traffic and contributes a lot to the usefulness of the site, so I need to keep focused on it.
BIG on the to-do list: Optimize my adsense in the content. I've got it, but it's performing very poorly. Also, get my tracking better set so I know what's making me money and what's total dead weight.
Looking at the possibility of offering paid subs at some point. Right now, the only think I know I'll offer in this case is ad-free, for the whole site. That makes sense to me, if they're supporting the site through the subs.
I should be able to check who's clicking the ads through my tracking tools to see how much of it is from members anyway. I'm betting with my membership and the topic of the site, most of my clicks are guests.
Anyway, that's today's random adventures in marketing.
Total Comments 4
Comments
 |  Sounds like you are doing very well, starting to see some good growth. Let us know what you find out, in terms of guest vs. member ad clicks. Paid subscriptions might be risky. What needs to be cleaned up about your recipes? |
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| |  Thanks for the encouragmenet. Always welcome! On the paid subs, I plan on keeping the content available for free. The main point of the site is to offer support for members and visitors, and I don't want to lose track of the core mission of the site. So right now, I'd only remove the ads for subscribers. But I'd like to offer them other things as well, once I figure out what.  I am fortunate in that I have a pretty loyal core memberbase that I believe would be willing to help support the site if the price was affordable for them. The site was all but dead for a few years with the expection of the forums because the previous owner had moved on to other things. The core members have repeatedly expressed their appreication for my taking over and the work I do on the site.Ironically, since redoing the site and adding new content, my bounce rate is down-along with my adsense! More people are staying, so less people are clicking out. On the recipes, I imported them from an old, home-brew system the site founder set up into drupal's recipe mod, and the import process is sloppy. So each one requires me to go in, move the ingredients to the individual ingredients spaces, put the nutritional info in the right place, etc. The final product is much better than the old version, they can change quantities on it, and allows me to set it up so later on, I can do a search so people can find recipes by ingredients on hand, how many net carbs limit, whatever. It would have been easier to just pull them in like articles, but for long term, I'll have better quality and more flexible content. I'm just paying the price with the work now. I've tried to take the long-term view at every opportunity with the site, and focus on quality and scalability, but that decision has meant that in many cases, a LOT more work for me. That's ok, 'cause I'm looking at the long haul, but I still gripe about the work... |
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| | Maybe you can get a programmer to write a script that auto-formats the recipes for the new system, or outsource the cleanup work to a freelancer. |
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| | thanks for the suggestions. i hadn't looked at a script approach, because the original content is too inconsistent, having been gathered over years. but i could well either consider some outsourcing or see if some of my mods or members would help. |
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