I am trying out something that I have heard a number of webmasters talk about and that is Monthly Newsletters for one of my forums.  One of the reasons that I am thinking about this now is that I have a good number of users, however very few of them are active.  I have also done some recent additions, including an arcade that I think that people may find enticing.

 So yesterday I wrote up a short letter and sent it via the Control Panel.  There are a number of “hacks” out there that will make this easier but I think that I will simply test it out this way for the time being.  I have already seen a modest result of this letter, there was a small increase of members signing in yesterday, however the number of posts didn’t increase much.  Most of the people were just playing in the Arcade.  Oh well that is what it is there for.

 I am going to send out another Newsletter in a few weeks time, by then I will have much more conent and a few more incentives of being a member.  Also there is a very interesting hack that I am going to check out for vBulletin.  It automatically sends out weekly, monthly, or any period you want, of updates new threads and a lot more.  There is also an option for users to NOT get this, which is great since there are a lot of people very sensitive about SPAM!!!

 I will keep everyone up-to-date on the progress of this, but needless to say, if you have a forum with a large number of members, but not very many posters, try sending out a short email to everyone.  It won’t hurt

I have been working hard looking for ways to get more people to my site.  I figure that if I have a reason for them to come and a reason for them to come back that they will eventually start reading and posting in my forums.  After a lot of thought I had decided on an arcade.  So I went to vbulletin.org to find the best which is v3arcade.  This is the most trusted arcade for vBulletin.  It is extremely easy to install and I had it up and running in very little time.

If you are interested you should check it out Here

 I have not had time to install many games, but the ones that are there are extremely fun :)  And if you have time while you are there you should post in the forums, vote in the polls, etc

Scouring the web you are sure to find thousands of web sites and products that claim to be able to make you web site into a miracle success. Build it once, walk away, and reap the benefits for years. They are selling services such as redirected traffic, free banners, auto surfers, and site submitters. While they may help, obviously they are no panacea.

The true winners are the people that are able to get their web site listed in the top spots on the main search engines. Submitting is a simple process but does not guarantee that Google or anyone else will list you. You can increase your chances by building what is commonly called inbound links. I am not talking about those stupid pages full of thousands of links (a.k.a. link farms). Search engines are smarter then they used to be and some will actually penalize you for being a part of a link farm.

What search engines like to see is your link on another site that contains highly relevant content. Some people are able to achieve this be paying for links and advertising, but why pay when you can build these links for free. By writing articles and submitting them to free article sites, you are creating those inbound links that become gateways for search engines to find your site and build up your page rank.

When choosing those sites to submit to there are a couple things to consider.

- Does the site have a high PR?

- Does the site have high traffic?

- Will the site accept my article?

High PR may help you get listed in search engines. It may also help your own PR.

High traffic obviously may help get people to your site quicker and directly from another site. Not all high PR sites have high traffic.

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by: Ron Isaiah

Most people don’t realize that the more money you spend for Google Adwords traffic in comparison to the Google AdWords ads in the positions below and above your ad, the less amount of traffic that will come to you.

If you’re looking at it by percentages, ask yourself: If your sales could go up 20%, would that be good if (all things being equal) your cost per click expense goes up by 30%? If this has in fact happened to you, congratulations! You have fallen into the Google Adwords CPC spiral. You have allowed the Google AdWords algorithms which determines the cost per click to add to the Google bottom line at your expense. If none of this makes sense, it should at least be clear that Google is making a fortune and they are only going to make more and more in the future.

This is the hardest thing for some Internet Marketers to understand. Google does not want a scenario where your sales drop 20 percent and the cost per click drops 20 percent as well, even though, if this happens to you, you will have effectively brought down your expenses and surprisingly, your profits will double or maybe even triple.

Never forget and always remember that you decide what you pay Google as well as the quality of traffic that comes from your Google AdWords campaign. Follow the following seven solid pieces of advice and watch what happens to your campaign.

1. Stay out of the top three positions where the lowest quality impulse clicks are most abundantly found

2. Get better traffic by improving your CTR by improving your ad.

3. Being in position 4-8 can be more lucrative by bringing in the more educated and serious buyers and keeping that cost per click down.
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The other day I made some money so I decided to get a banner designed for my directory BluenoserLinks so what I did was open a contest at NamePros and got a really cool banner for only $15.

Then today I decided that I wanted to show this banner off on a test site. So I browsed the directory at AdBrite.com and found a site that I thought fit. Then I started through the check-out procedure, but wouldn’t you know it, the animated gif banner that I had made was too large, and me being at a computer that isn’t the one that I usually use, didn’t have any editors. That is when I came acorss a cool site www.gifworks.com

GifWorks.com allows you to do image editing online for FREE, and as far as I can tell no catches either, there wasn’t even a pop-up, or notice of one getting blocked. That is what I call a clean site, and as far as ease of use goes, it was great. Mind you I don’t think that I would like to use it to create design banner ads, but it worked great in a pinch when I had to reduce the size of my banner a couple kB.