11 Ways To Increase Forums ActivitesWritten by Pinyo Bhulipongsanon
Getting people to post in your forum is probably hardest thing to do. First, not all of your readers will post messages. In fact, only a small percentage will post regularly, and most will never post at all. Second, nobody want to be first person to post a message. In fact, topic starters (people that start new topic of discussion) will be a small percentage of your posters; rest will simply reply to topics that have been started. In order to get forum to a point where it is self-sustaining, you will have to do a lot of work. Here are some tips that you can use to get your forum rolling: If nobody will start a post, start it yourself Register yourself as several members (you with multiple identities) and talk to yourself. (Note that this will not work in forum with logged IP). This will create enough "seed" posts to get people to read and perhaps add replies of their own.Find topics that interest people If you get a mental block and cannot find anything interesting to talk to yourself about, then go to other web sites and see what people in those communities are talking about in their forums. You can also look at usenet newsgroups. Digest these ideas and regurgitate them using your various identities.Advertise your forums relentlessly Make sure your forum is accessible from every page of your site, particularly index page. Make link highly visible, or outright talk about it on home page. Add a link to your web site and forum as part of your email, usenet and forum signature. Frequent other forums and mention your site and forum from time to time (be careful to comply to their rules and not to spam).Use your forums to support your web site You can ask your visitors "What do you think about this article?" (or tool, tutorial, etc.) and ask them to post their comments in forums. Additionally, use it as part of your customer support program. For instance, I use our web site forums to support our free PHP scripts.Use your forums to annouce new changes to your site This is a great way to make announcement because people can write their thoughts about new feature (or article) you've just added.Find allies There are many webmasters that have exact same delimas as yours. Look for sites with empty or low traffic forums and email these webmasters. Offers to join their forums and post a few messages, then ask them if they can return you same favor. If they want to know why you are bothering them, ask them to read this article.
| | A Painless Plagiarism SolutionWritten by David Walker
A crowded marketplace can lead to unethical webmasters using underhand techniques to get ahead of their competitors and online plagiarism is one of easiest.I had worked hard on copy for my sales page at Watch Live Football (http://www.watchlivefootball.com), ensuring copy was relevant to potential customers and contained keyword rich phrases to assist with search engine ranking. Understandably, I was incensed when I found not one, but two websites selling a similar service had not just pinched a few key phrases here and there from my website, but had reproduced entire text verbatim! I found these offending websites by using Copyscape (http://www.copyscape.com) which is an invaluable, free tool, in battle against online plagiarism. It highlighted that my competitors had stolen 254 words from my sales copy despite there being a clear copyright logo at foot of each page of my website. However, this alone does not prevent an unscrupulous webmaster and CTRL & C command in full flow. Fortunately, dealing with plagiarism on internet can be a straightforward process and incidents resolved quickly and amicably before any real ‘action’ needs to be taken. This is how I ensured my sales copy was removed from two offending websites in less than 24 hours of discovery. Write a polite, but firm email to webmaster of offending website and explain that you have found your copyrighted work has been illegally reproduced on it. If you have used Copyscape to detect plagiarism you could even include link that highlights illegally used copy and states an actual word count.
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