As the readers here know, I was planning on having a contest on ThePartyLive, however that has changed, I have more work to do before I do that. 

When I was sitting around with a few friends on Thursday I asked them about my site and why they don’t post.  I told them that there were lots of topics and I am sure that they would enjoy at least one.  Well it turns out that the reason they didn’t click the link in my sig or MSN was because they couldn’t get a feel about what the site was about from the URL.  www.thepartylive.com doesn’t really describe Canadian discussion. 

So following that I feel that the reason I can’t get refferals into members may be that they either don’t know what the site is, or get a different impression from the link, and then when they find the site they decide to turn away.  That is why I am going to get a new URL (done) and start a change over.  I am going to do it slowly, over a couple of months and 301 everything from thepartylive.com to the new site.

When the new site is running and everything is active again I will start the contest, maybe get it rolling in August and then have the draw end of Sept.  By then I hope to have 6 VERY active members and some more people using TPLNews

I will annouce the new Name when I have the domain parked and new logo up.

I have been thinking that I am going to re-start TPL-Canada.  It has been a VERY long while since I have done anything on this site, so I am going to give it 8 months of time to see if I can get it to critical mass and then have it running for itself.

One of my ideas is contests.  The first contest is going to be blogging reviews.  I am going to offer a decent prize, maybe a Ipod Nano, or video to the winner.  The winner would be a simple draw, and an individual registered member can enter as many times as they want depending on the number of blogs they have.  There will be stipulations including, must be registered on The Party Live and must have 5 posts.  The blog posts must also include a link to a list of pages (one link).

The reason I haven’t started the contest is that I am not sure how to market it.  I am thinking of just starting a post and then post in a number of different forums, blogs, etc and then Adsense.  I do have a budget for this so that is going to be important.

If this goes well I will have a posting contest directly afterward and then a maybe mini monthly-posting contests for advertising space, if the winner doesn’t have something that they want to advertise then I will offer a list of charities that they can use instead.

If anyone has any ideas on other ways that I can drive this site to the Canadian public let me know.

Jeff