Converting Visitors to Members - Just How?

Blueprint4Love said:
Nah, my blorum :)p) is about love, relationships, spirituality, ghosts and things. Nothing technical, all matters of the heart and the unseen but one does have to be a bit 'weird' and out there to 'get it' or be interested in it.

I'm thinking to hold an official pre-launch this 11/11/11 and offer premium memberships for free for life as in 'grandfathered' in (ugh I don't like that term). Am setting this up today. They will have to be registered by 12/21/11 to get 'grandmothered' in. That'll be the official launch date.
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I'd avoid 11/11 if you want Americans as they are often sensitive about that date.
Use 12/12 - it's a weekend day anyway ... better allow longer like a fortnight to recruit grandmothers, just to get some members in.

Ive never liked blogs much - an uneasy cross between an article page and a forum in my view. It never feels like there's enough scope for interaction - like being at a conference and forced into passive mode except for a grudging 5 mins 'question time' at the end of a lecture. I prefer seminars - or ovulars ;)

On my own board I'm using Jaxel's wiki to create articles and hoping to get it so I can easily link top and bottom of the article to its own discussion thread in a forum.

On the gendering of words by the way I work on the principle of who's talking.
I'm female so it should be natural to me to speak of a mistress copy, or a grandmother clause in law. If it ain't my female ID needs some sprucing up! Similarly I write to - Dear Madam/ Sir, ...
A male speaker or writer understandably uses more male language than I do and I'm fine with that.
But I think it's a shame and a little unhealthy for women to speak constantly of our actions in male language as if to be male is the foundation model of humanity.
 
Blueprint4Love said:
well said, Morgain! Will check out Jaxel's wiki.
Click to expand...

I like the wiki because creating and editing its pages is so easy - right on the frontend, no html needed unless you wish it.
Also I find the clickable glossary function useful (embedded words click to a page with same title) .
NOTE - it's not a full wiki so not intended for open editing.
It uses familiar bbcodes like writing a familiar forum message - much easier than the wiki codes.
I found it an easy install. It's a bit odd setting up the categories/ you make a page per category on the root - but not using the index page though.
My main grumble is that I can't place selected wiki pages in the forum list hierarchy under my category nodes. So I have to use some XF Pages which I don't like nearly as much as the easygoing wiki pages. Also it leaves the wiki pages/ area to the navbar links to find, although i extensively use a sidebar menu too. I don't know yet if this is something Jaxel needs to add or if it's an issue on the XF side.
 
yayy, my week long patience has been rewarded with an amazing new member who said the following:

"What an interesting forum. I rarely feel compelled to join the forums I encounter on my travels, but I was struck by the nice vibe here and the useful, thought provoking posts. So I have taken the plunge!"

What's cool is that I was unavailable all day today (visiting dad at the hospital) and when I returned someone else had actually welcome this member before me. It feels so great to know that other love convent members, although only one week old, are already feeling compelled to welcome others. Ahhhh, it feels like bliss to do what you're meant to do, doesn't it! Finally on the right track... :p
 
Well done... another 10 - 20 of those type of members, active, and your forum will be well on its way to future growth. Congratulations... and yes, I also feel the same way with "what you're meant to do" as rewarding.
 
Nice :) All you need is some content which attracts users and make them to jump on board and say hi ! It's taking me a lot of work to get users to participate. I know more then 100 registered members finally but rarely less then 30 are active .
 
I'd suggest you contact that kind member and make a big fuss of how you appreciate what they did - I'm sure you will do/ have done that anyway.
But you could add that having a few key members doing this is the make or break of your board.
Therefore would they mind having Convo with you about it because maybe one or two other members might be willing to help welcome newcomers as well. (Agenda, Get this member to contact others and draw them into an inner circle of founders and welcomers.)
Whether this is too early to make this one a mod or not is a judgement call. Probably it is but after these conversations - a small meeting of you two and another or two others?) it would be appropriate.
Make being a mod a trial basis to see if they like it so they don't feel it is a heavy duty.
 
Wise input and thank you! I do go into each new members profile and post a personal welcome message and I 'like' and respond to all posts in the forum. I do not have an official moderator yet and wanted to be careful in choosing them. I'm still not sure if I should separate the moderators per forum category or how I will do that. For now, with 15 minutes, I'm okay. But all these things are going through the back of my head. ;)

I have a few pre-launch and actual-launch ideas and some viral-ideas that I am putting together. I will try them out, keep stats and then share them here with the results. Stay tuned.
 
I hope this update helps some of you. Tomorrow will be two weeks since I unofficially launched my spiritual love blorum. It is not a blog and it is not a forum, it is a blorum. Our community loves the new term. I learned that it's okay to be eccentric at times. ;)

Even though we only have 21 members now, with these members the site, which didn't exist at all three weeks ago, went from 0 on Alexa to 651,449. How? No clue, not even sure if it's important.

What's important is that I have played with the suggestions that have been made here. Here is what I have tried:

1. Restrict certain forum access for guests but leaving the forum visible for them
2. Restrict attachment access (which conflicted with Jaxel's portal)
3. Only making a certain percentage visible of each post (add on is not 1.1 functional)

Note, I didn't try all of them together but individually.

As soon as I decided to restrict about 80% of forums from being visible from guests, suddenly I got inundated with current members who complained because it was them who referred others to the forum in the first place. I got a very nice response from one member who first introduced himself and stated that he usually doesn't join forum but 'this was different.' After I restricted access to new guests it was him who spoke up. You can see his detailed response here.

Clearly he urges me to unhide the forum as it is what makes the forum different.

Never having run a forum before, I feel completely thrown into the deep end and if it wasn't for your help, there's no way I would be this courageous. So thank you all for sharing your wisdom!

Next up is a little widget that I am having designed right now, which will be on my blorum and the widget html code can be taken by others to put on their website. It will build one-way links back to my blorum. This should also help hugely. Will show it to you when it's done. :D
 
The alexa rank is due to your forum getting a lot of traffic. About converting guests to members, give it some time. You have a very interesting forum and I predict that it will become very popular in the near future. The stats until now seem to point that way. They are very impressive for a 3 weeks old forum. You have done a real good job with it. Congratulations :)
 
Mwah, Borbole! Thank you. Couldn't do this without the help of this fabulous board. Did I mention I took 9 months to research just the right forum software? And you wouldn't believe what made me pick XF (will tell ya later). I plan to write a chapter about this 9 month journey with my pitfalls and post it here and over on the warrior forum. I think it could help a lot of newbies who are struggling with the same questions I had. But first want to show better numbers. :p
 
Blueprint4Love said:
Mwah, Borbole! Thank you. Couldn't do this without the help of this fabulous board. Did I mention I took 9 months to research just the right forum software? And you wouldn't believe what made me pick XF (will tell ya later). I plan to write a chapter about this 9 month journey with my pitfalls and post it here and over on the warrior forum. I think it could help a lot of newbies who are struggling with the same questions I had. But first want to show better numbers. :p
Click to expand...

Looking forward to see the reasons why you picked xenforo Blueprint4Love, which in my opinion was a very good decision as xenforo is a great software. It is the future of forums.
 
Well, I promised to give an update and it's been 4 weeks since I started my blorum. Yes, we lovingly call it a love blorum, because it is not a blog, not a forum - a blorum.
  1. I started with 0 members and created a handful of 'fictitious' members, which still exist, to lay the energetic foundation of the blorum
  2. We now have 38 members (including the handful that I created), so we're getting about 1 member per day (yesterday we got 2)
  3. I had two fancy widgets designed which serve 3 purposes: 1. give them away as free gifts for other blog and site users, 2. the two widgets have amazing energetic powers as one does 'cleaning' and the other does 'manifesting' (so law of attraction people love these gifts), and 3. each widget gives me two one-way backlinks per widget placed
  4. Since the launch of these widgets a week ago several have already been installed on PR4 and PR5 sites (on several of their pages) which eventually will bring links back to my site (I have no clue how it works, how long it takes, yadda-yadda, I just heard one-way backlinks are a must, so there I go)
  5. I used Jake's page-to-tab add-on (thank you) to create the information about the widget and then sent the link out to FB and Twitter; since 11-23-11 that page alone has received over 61,411 page views, has been retweeted 6006 times and 'liked' 31 times on FB (yes, I still think there should be more members with these numbers)
  6. The average time spent on our blorum goes from 8.5 to 9.5 minutes
So far so good. The 'not-so-good' is that a couple of people have already tried the paste-and-run method but their account gets deleted without warning (only happened once so far and another having to be warned). I have trained our members (and thanks to Xenfans 'welcome block') to first place their avatar and then introduce themselves in the 'meet and greet' section so we can give them an official group hug. Not doing so will have members all over them - it's very cute to watch how protective they have become of their love blorum. :-)

Also not so good is that a couple of people have tried to 'innocently' post links to their workshops, etc. The 'admin' (moi) immediately logs in and removes all urls in the body, telling them to go put it in the signature; it works). I am in the process now of creating a 'market place' where people can upgrade their membership for a fee and freely post their courses and stuff in there. Will keep you posted.

Oh and yes, I'm at this 14 hours a day (lots of writing, responding, because we are neither a blog nor a forum, but a blorum). lol :p

My idealistic goal is to have 100 members by the end of this year. Ambitious? Yes, and totally doable. Will keep you posted.

Thanks for all your help! :notworthy:
 
Just an update: 3rd of February, 2012:

100 members, 3,085 messages, 436 discussions

Backlinks: 14,404

Alexa ranking: 574K for Alexa and 177K for U.S.

Thank you all for your help! :D
 

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