The problem was I tried to install it once on a older site and host, and OpenX and my hosting account were not getting along.

Along comes a new way to use OpenX.  You can now sign up to enter a beta program for OpenX Hosted.  This is a basic version of the OpenX platform, but you sign up on their site and they host the program.  So far I enjoy it, and it makes life much easier by keeping all of my sites in a single location when it comes to advertising and campaigns.  I highly recommend signing up for the beta and trying it out yourself if you’re looking for a Ad Management system.  The only problem I’ve ran into so far was I had a 15 minute period of time at around 1am this past week that the system must have been down.  This slowed loading on my pages dramatically, but I have not had any other problems with it since then.  This could be from an update OpenX was doing to their platform.

Below in the screenshot, you can see my month by month registrations over the past year.  You can see the growing trend overall.  This is something you want to see in a growing community.

12 Month Registrations

Why do we get burnt out?

First, I’d say that new (or relatively small) communities can really wear out an admin when you’re one of the only consistant posters.  Many people start forums expecting users to just show up, sign up, and start posting which is most often not the case in the beginning.  That is the overall goal but it isn’t easy to attain right away without some content in your forums before hand.  This is why adding content when starting (or even before going live) is a big help to getting started.  As a admin builds up content and doesn’t see a fast growth they’ll grow tired and fade out or give up entirely. I’ll post a more in-depth article of tips on Starting a Forum with content later.

On the other hand, you can have a very large site with an adminstrator who’s trying to keep up with all the new threads, private messages, emails, etc… that come with a large user-base.  It’s easy to get caught up and stay on your site for hours but at a point you need to remove yourself from your site and probably the computer in general.  It’s not worth slaving yourself for hours only to lose interest with your site.

As I’ve said many times before, hard work and patience are two of the most important keys in creating a successful forum.  You want your forum to endure for a long time, and beating yourself up mentally will only hurt you in the end.  We all need to have lives outside of our business/community.

Forum Consultation

I’ve decided to begin Online Forum Consulting on a one-on-one basis.  I’ve been around for a quite a while now and have personally made some good and bad decisions to affect my communities.  While the bad decisions were not the best thing for me at the time, I learned from them so now anyone who’s new won’t have to make those sacrifices.  I’ve been a forum administrator and owner for over 5 years and I’m proud to say I now have 2 flourishing forums.  I’ve built up and sold 3 others.

If you’re new to administrating forums and communities it can be a very daunting task to stay on top of everything.  I’ve managed to make my admin duties much less intense by some simple and some not-so-simple time management decisions.

Not only have I been an administrator for 5+ years, I have continued to stay on top of all the forum happenings over this time.  Everything from the differences in free forum software choices, to vBulletin modifications and styles.

If you’d like more information or a quote for a online consultation, don’t hesitate to Contact Me

I am one of the people who you’ll always see use proper (or what I consider proper) grammar and spelling.  I find it almost tough to take someone who spells horribly, uses tons of internet and leet (1337) characters in their posts.

Not only is it a bit annoying for me to read on my forums, I get worried it may detract from older, experienced members of a niche from registering when they see childish “text talk” on a forum where real ideas and problems are being exchanged.

I have guidelines in my forums to discourage people from talking in many of the common short-character languages that the internet has created.  I don’t want to hurt these people’s feelings, but it’s not professional or entertaining to me or many others who want somewhere they can read sentences, not a paragraph with no punctuation or periods.  It’s actually come to the point where I notice that users who use proper grammar and spelling get helped much easier in my Camaro and Firebird Forums.  Why would my other users waste time on attempting to read something that is more of a strain to them when they can just move on to the next post and help someone who put some time into their thread knowing that people are there helping them for free.

I guess that’s the end of my soapbox rant for the day.

Looks like a very nice place so far, with tons of room, and its on a corner lot so a bigger yard than most houses in that area.  Already has a fence which is nice when we toy with the idea of getting a canine to guard our precious belongings.

I am happy to be where I am currently with F-Body Online (FBO).  While many others dwarf FBO, we’ve managed to carve out a spot in the camaro and firebird world with nothing but hard work.  I’ve not paid a single dollar in advertising, adwords, or anything of that sort for this forum.  I’m not boasting about that because if I did have the cash to throw at it, I probably would have given in and done it but it didn’t work out that way.

Because of the age of the forum and its size, it’s become a very tight-knit community with very little drama (that’s VERY rare on an automotive forum especially) and one of my biggest concerns is to make sure that everyone feels comfortable posting and asking questions.  Think about it- If you’re running a community based on users posting and interacting with others, being intimidated isn’t going to help you at all.  I’ve received dozens of messages and emails from users just letting me know that we’re one of the most helpful and respectful communities they’ve been a part of and that lets me know that what I’m working for is worth it.

I’ve got some very big plans in store for FBO in the very near future.  One of which I’ll give a little hint to here right now.

I’ve been quite busy working on a few projects I’m really excited about.  One of which is a Fantasy Sports game with a focus on long-term strategy and financing your athletes.  I wish I could say more on that front, but hopefully within a few weeks we’ll have a full launch.  We’re currently working on the design as well as some finishing statistics touches.  The plan as of now is to make this completely free, with the possibility of creating a even more realistic premium version later on down the road as it grows.

Another venture I’ve started is a Freelance Web Design site.  I’m currently working with another programmer and we compliment one another well with our strengths to help just about anyone.  With that I’ve started designing and coding some wordpress themes that I hope to start releasing within the next month or so.

That’s whats been going on as of recently, and I’ll keep updating on the status of the Fantasy Sports site.

I don’t want to give anything away, but it’s a sports fantasy game that works quite well and is very heavy on the strategy and management side of the sport.

I’ll be posting a full scope of this project soon, but if anyone is a Fantasy Sports fan and would like to beta test for me let me know.

I’m just a regular guy, who researched a bit of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics, and then ran across vBSEO and thought it looked interesting but couldn’t get over the price.  About 5 months after my forum started I bit the bullet and bought the software for my Camaro & Firebird site.

I installed vBSEO on August 13th, 2007.  I’ve had some up and downs since then, but one thing that has never gone down during this time is search engine referrals (especially google).

Since I installed Google Analytics only 2 and a half months before the install of vBSEO I can understand why skeptics could be a bit turned off by the above graph.

However, this one gives real proof

When a Forum that is little over 1 year old and has only 700 members is ranking higher on almost all terms than forums with 10’s of thousands of members and 5+ years online, something is working well.

Sure, I’ve done other things to help my search engine rankings as everyone should.  No one states that vBSEO or any other SEO product is a magic install that just works and you can leave your site stagnant for 1 year and then blame them when it goes wrong.  However, I am no SEO Expert, just a guy who started a site online, read some free articles and watched some videos, talked with others and am now on the top of google (for a few terms-more will come with time).  I see the price tag of vBSEO now and wouldn’t think twice of buying a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th license if I had the forums that needed it.