I run a men's advice blog http://womopo.com and have gotten the traffic required to start adding community elements to the site. I have a few ideas, but I'm really not sure what the best strategy to take. Currently, there is no community interaction on the site. Features I'm thinking of adding: -Comments -Forums -User registration (w/ benefits) I'm shying away from starting a forum because it seems like by adding a forum, I'm diverging the focus of my readers by having discussions on both articles and on the forum. Has anyone successfully integrated VBulletin into their blog to handle user registrations, blog comments, and running a forum? I think that would be my ideal solution. But then again, making users register is always a tricky thing to do. Would it be better to just open up comments and not require any registration? I'm having a tough time deciding what to do. Any comments would be appreciated thanks.
Opening up comments not requiring to register is one good way to encourage sharing. Just make sure you moderate the comments in case the spamming gets out of control. Forum is a much better way to build up bonding with your readers. They can interact better with each other as compared to putting comments on each article. However, you will have to identify the talkers in your current list before starting a forum. You wouldn't want to open a forum with you initiating all the threads yourself.. Don't rush over this forum thing until you have some interesting elements to supplement. You will know when the time arrives for you to start a forum
Just open everything up for people to see. If you don't want to do that, then buy posts and push up the post count. This will interest people.
That's a nice design you have there. Definitely add some user interaction like comments. (And maybe a hot girl or two on the front page.)
Can anyone comment on the VBulletin comment/forum solution? Freeroller, the pics cost me about 170$. I paid the model 100$, the banner cost $70 and I lucked out and was able to get an hour in the studio for free (the owner came late and didn't set everything up, so he was cool enough to give me free studio time. Otherwise, it would have cost $20 for an hour in there)
Ok thanks, thats a fair price i guess. On the VBulletin it is absolutley possible, don't know if there are some addons available to do it without that much work, but it's possible if you know how to program to implement such system into your site, and shouldn't bee too much work.
Is it usually beneficial to not integrate a forum to your site until you have created an established audience to your main page? I usually thought that including a forum day 1 was good policy to encourage brand, readership loyalty.
fawfull, i agree. right now, the site isn't huge by any means, but it is growing. I would like to add some smaller community features first like commenting and expand to a forum later on. But ialso want commenting and the forum system to be integrated some how. That's the biggest challenge at the moment. Thanks for the advice guys. I have a lot of work on my plate.
I don't know if it's still a possibility given all the updates, but phpBB and WordPress could at one time be integrated using a phpBB mod called WP-United. I had it on a wordpress blog at one time, worked great.
That's a really nice looking site. Good job. I think commenting is a good place to start - people can share their ideas and whatnot and then take it from there.
it's pretty easy unless you have your forum in a subdomain like me if you use a folder like site.com/forum/ it's pretty simple, you just need a hack from vbulletin.org just wanted to point that out, gl with the forum, they are a blast and frustrating at the same time
Congrats with all your accomplishments. I hope I can get up to your level of traffic for my site. I wish to keep it under wraps for now but tell me what you did to gain the initial traffic that you have now.