As I venture from one part of the web to another, I have noticed more and more community owners suggesting that you give contests to your members as it keeps the forum active. While this is the case in some instances, contests might not always come with a positive outcome. There is always a risk when it comes to giving something away, because you can never know the result. So, why don’t contests always work?

Participation

No matter what type of contest you run on your community, you are going to need participation from a lot of members. If your community is just starting off then barely anyone is going to take part in the contest. The whole purpose of a contest is to increase activity, but if there is only a small percentage of members participating in the contest then you are losing more than gaining. Therefore you are possibly giving away something in which you could have saved for a more proper time.

Attracting The Wrong Crowd

Believe it or not there are people who search the Internet for free stuff! While obviously its a smart thing on their part, because they are saving some cash but its an overall bad thing for you. If your contest offers a very desirable product, lets say as an example, photoshop. Then people are going to take part just to earn the prize and not to actually take part in the community. Everyday, I see the same members going from forum to forum just to take part in contests for prizes. Those are obviously the kind of members you want to avoid.

Advertising the Contest

Unless you have already built a following, then you are going to have to alert the people in your niche that you are having a contest. Am I the only one who sees something wrong with this? Your paying for the contest prize and then you also have to advertise it? Id much rather spend that time building reputable links instead of giving away my money and that’s the truth.

Cheaters

A contest always has a cheater of some sort, whether it be them spamming content or paying people to sign up. So, when creating your contest you are going to have to make sure to keep on top on who is doing what and how they are earning their spot in the contest. ALWAYS, make sure to investigate the techniques of the top 3, especially if your running a referral based contest. The main goal is to get the prize to real winner and not someone who took a shortcut.

Now believe me when I tell you that contests can work, but you have to hold them on the right time. Ideally when your first starting off a community, a contest should be the last thing on your mind until you bring in a reputable audience. After you have gained your audience then you can start a contest to bring in an extra boost of traffic. This is just my opinion, so what do you think about contests?

This post was kindly provided by Josh, the owner of the webmaster blog Admining. So, make sure to check out his blog if your interested in reading more webmaster, search engine optimization and forum administration related tips.

One of the best ways to establish more traffic to your blog is through guest blogging. Forget about article marketing for a while, guest blogging is a more powerful marketing strategy for your blog. This is because you are writing to an already established community that will have interest in your topic, while if you do article marketing, you are writing for random people that you don’t know and don’t know what their interests are which mean you will generally not gain the same interest as when you’re guest blogging. Because of this I have 7 strategies to become a successful guest blogger:

1. Know your target audience
Guest blogging essentially means that you are writing a blog post for a different audience. Obviously different blogs will have different audiences so If you want to have a successful guest post, you must know and get the feel about the audience of the blog you will be writing for. Before writing a guest post, you should take the time to read as many posts as you can by said blog. Learn about how their audience responds the posts you have read and once you understand the atmosphere of the host blog, you will have a better understanding about the post that you should write for the host blog.

2. Submit only your best content
When writing a guest post, you are staking your reputation as a blogger or an expert in your field. This is why you should only submit your best content to the host blog. Polish up your content as much as you can before you submit it. To put is simply, if you give the best content, you will get the best results.

3. Give strong call to action
Don’t just write your guest post and ask nothing in return. This is not the spirit of guest blogging. Give the best of your tips, but don’t forget to put strong call of action to encourage people to visit your blog. Without giving strong call to action in your guest post, you will lost huge potential traffic for your blog. However, keep in mind that you should avoid promoting your product or service in your guest post. It will turn people off. The best call to action for your guest post is to ask your readers to visit your blog or subscribe to your newsletter.

4. Eliminate errors in your writing
In order to get the maximum consideration from the host blogger, you must eliminate all kinds of errors such as grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors before submitting your guest post.

5. Give good interaction with your readers
Once the host blog has published your guest post, your post will will begin to receive comments by regular readers of the blog. Do not miss this great opportunity. You can use this to communicate more with the readers and build a good reputation for yourself. By doing this and showing them the kind of blogger you are and allows for a better chance of the readers actually going over to your own blog.

6. Find a high traffic blog
If your aim of guest blogging is to get yourself known and expand to new audiences then you can’t just write a guest post to any blog. You should find a high traffic blog that your content can relate to and see if they will allow you to publish your guest post there. You can do this by browsing through things like the Technorati blog directory as it has thousands of blogs on various niches.

7. Do it over and over
If you want to succeed as a guest blogger then you must become a regular at it. Find good quality high traffic blogs and see if they’re interested in you becoming a regular guest blogger. You can do this for many blogs if you have the time and even if certain blogs may not want you as a regular guest blogger don’t miss a great opportunity if they’re only interesting in a single post.

Guest blogging can and will always be an effective method of attracting new traffic to your blog. If you use these correctly then these strategies mentioned above will help you to become a successful guest blogger.

When creating a new forum there are many things that you must consider. These can be things anywhere from the niche, the theme, your target audience or even the domain name. Of course there’s a few only a few things we consider upon creating a new forum. Many of these things are decided quite fast and can work out perfectly but from my experience in forum administration and watching other communities develop I have noticed 5 big mistakes that are becoming more and more common every day.

Too Many Forums
One of the biggest issues and most common things I see if new forum owners doing is creating way too many different forums. There are a lot of reasons behind this and from personal experience I can understand a lot of them. You may feel your forum needs branched out discussion or in a lot of cases you won’t even see yourself as having made a lot of forums.
In reality though creating a large amount of forums will only lead to one thing and that is that many of these forums will not get enough posts in them and in return will make your community look far less active than it really is. By combining appropriate forums and taking out any that really are not needed it will make your job of populating the forums with content much easier and give new members the impression your forum is far more active.
Once your forum is a few months old and you have a good group of active members it will let you see what forums are getting used and which aren’t. At this point you will know if you need to remove, merge or even split the current forums.

Inactive Staff
The next biggest mistake in creating a new forum is inactive staff members. This one is actually very simple, if you and other staff members do not create new topics daily as well as posting in others topics you will not establish an active community. New members love to see an admin or other staff members posting, it shows that they are there because they want to be and enjoy discussing different things amongst members and not just there because they want to own a forum and have an important title.
I personally find this to be the most important thing during the first months of any forum.

Too Many Staff Members
This is a huge mistake I see in a lot of new forums these days and that is hiring far too many staff members. In reality if you’re creating a new forum and you plan to really dedicate yourself to it then up until you have at least a few hundred members and 5000+ posts you should be able to handle all staff duties yourself. I am not saying up until that point you should not hire anyone else but that is just an indicator of general staffing needs. Up until that point if you have more than 1 moderator and 1 other admin besides yourself then you are over staffed in my opinion.
Depending on your niche and what your forum offers you may need more but if you’re at the kind of point I mentioned above and you have something like 5 moderators and 4 admins then you’re just going way overboard. There is no reason for that. Hire staff as you feel they’re needed, when things become too much for you to handle alone not just for the sake of doing so.

Ugly Ads
Now to be fair I will say that this has not been as common in my eyes lately but is definitely a big problem for new forums. This problem is displaying too many big ugly ads in the hope of earning some extra revenue. I, like any other admin loves gaining some extra revenue but you must think of your users. If you want to display a couple ads on your forum then you should go ahead and do so but first think long and hard about where they should be placed. You may notice a lot of your regular members will not mind if they enjoy they community but one of the most off putting things for someone visiting your forum for the first time will be seeing these giant banner ads all over the place. I guarantee you that over 50% of the time this will result in them closing the page in under 5 seconds.
So do yourself and your users a favor and put some time and effort into creating specific areas for ads that do not get in the way of anything.

Useless Plugins/Add-ons
With every new forum regardless of the software you choose there are always a bunch of plugins/add-ons that you will want to install but before doing so really think about it. Think to yourself if it will benefit the community, if it has a real purpose or it is just something you think is “cool”. Remember that just because another big forum is using it does not mean you need to do the same. I see far too many new forums installing 20+ plugins/add-ons within the first hour and in reality only 2-3 of them are actually doing anything to benefit the community. In conclusion about the use of plugins/add-ons just keep in mind that these have been designed to improve your forum and if they aren’t going to do this then there is absolutely no reason to install them, they are only going to slow down your forum in the end.

In conclusion, if you avoid these 5 common and very simple mistakes then your forum is going to have have a much better chance of succeeding in not just the beginning but in the future.

Welcome to Karoshio.NET.

This blog is going to serve as the home for all my articles, tutorials and reviews relating to things around the internet that I write for http://adminpeak.com.

I will be writing on topics such as: SEO, SMO, HTML/CSS tutorials, web hosting reviews, software reviews and much more.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned !