vbulletin 4.0: CMS but new URLs
Good news and bad news about vbulletin 4.0:
Good news! They finally built an official CMS around it!
Bad news! They’ve rewritten URLs!
The first is a very positive development - I’ve been using vbulletin for forums, but usually had to use Wordpress as a front end CMS. It would be great to be able to integrate both.
However, [...]
Admiring other content networks
I’ve taken the route of trying to be small publisher covering different niches, and sometimes can’t help but admire the strides some other sites have taken.
Of course, certain networks such as internet.com and ientry have been on webmaster radars for a long time, and give the impression of being somewhat corporate.
However, there are plenty of [...]
Search frequency does not equal competition
One of the big misconceptions I see on business forums is the idea:
“That the number of documents returned on a keyword search on Google, has a direct correlation with the competitiveness of the keyword.”
Once you see people posting examples of their “SEO successes” by use of this measurement, you can easily see that search frequency [...]
When forum members set up a rival forum…
When you’re a forum admin, the site of some of your other forum members setting up a rival forum can be pretty chilling.
Firstly, if you do see this, don’t panic.
If you’ve been a good admin, the only people who’ll really resent your forum are the people you probably aren’t comfortable having on there anyway.
Secondly, [...]
Lots of tips on the Platinax Forums
I’m trying not to post too much of particular use on my blog at present - let’s just say Brian Turner the SEO and my SEO company want to keep a general low profile for the time being. :)
However, I am pushing Platinax - a different company I run - and am currently publishing a [...]
Simple vbulletin SEO tips: The Title Tag
We covered SEO titles for Wordpress in the last entry - now let’s optimise the titles for popular forum software platform vbulletin a little better.
As before, we want our site name to actually be the forum index page name. That means moving away from the generic titles to something a little more specific.
There are a [...]
Revenue Share - the next webmaster economy?
Recently I’ve noticed an emerging new trend online - revenue share as a business model applied to forums, blogs, and news communities.
The idea is simple - whatever advertising revenues the site earns is split with the active community members.
The most common way this is set up is via contextual advertising accounts, such as Google Adsense, [...]
Now is the time to have a business survival strategy: recession is looming
I know many people don’t pay too much attention to general economic data, but because of the news sites I publish I’ve been covering economic indicators over the past three years.
Here’s the bottom line - the booming world economy has been financed by borrowing - a debt bubble that has been warned about continually for [...]
Revenue share for vbulletin
I’m currently looking at the possibility of setting up revenue share on one or more of my forums.
Just for reference, here are a couple of the plugins I’m currently looking at:
vB Ad Management 3.1 (Ad Sharing Edition)
Adsense Revenue Sharing for 3.5.x and 3.6.x
A number of revenue share forums can be found listed here:
AdSense Revenue Sharing [...]
vbulletin SEO
When it comes to SEO for vbulletin, there are a few simple approaches you can take that most vb admins simply do not understand:
1. Duplicate content
I’ve already listed some of the serious duplicate content problems that vbulletin has, and how to address them.
However, despite being given a SEO perspective, some vb admins think they are [...]
Using SEO to fight scams
I had someone turn up at Platinax, warm themselves up to members - and then invite others to be “mentored” by him - by paying $1k to join what appears by all accounts to be a pyramid scheme.
The scheme is entirely based on reselling rights to resell rights for a bunch of junk ebooks and/or [...]
Adding value for monetising websites
Today I got to thinking a lot more seriously about revenue generation options for monetising websites.
Although I’ve pretty much doubled my Adsense earnings over the past month, it’s still not a huge amount.
And today it really hit me how meagre the revenues are relative to other earning options.
The main reason I have websites is to [...]
Think about Link Equity and Content Value
Link Equity
SEO’s used to talk a lot about preserving PageRank - I used to think of PageRank as like water, and building a good site archtecture was about funneling this into the right sections of the site in the right manner.
PageRank as a useful SEO term is pretty much redundant, but Aaron Wall now speaks [...]
Tip: Google indexing faster via Google Blog Search pings?
Marketing Pilgrim reports - and says it has confirmed - webmaster chatter suggesting that pinging Google’s blog search service will get your blog indexed faster.
This sounds remarkably similar to last year when it was demonstrated that adding your blog feed to “my yahoo” also expedited indexing.
So if you’re using Wordpress and/or vbseo, there’s a new [...]
How I’ve increased Adsense earnings by 50%
I’m not a huge Adsense earner, but at the beginning of this month I decided to more aggressively try to increase my revenues.
I’ve now seen a 50+% increase in my Adsense earnings since I began.
What does that mean in real terms? It means my earnings would now comfortably pay off the monthly mortgage repayments [...]
SEO for vbulletin - simple how to and tips
When I first bought vbulletin it was because it was the most search-friendly forum platform out there. It’s also very powerful and is the most effective at handling spam.
But as a SEO the optimisation of vbulletin for search engines has always been my primary concern.
Heck, it was how I learned SEO - how do you [...]
vbulletin template sites
I’ve been looking into using one or more vbulletin templates recently.
On the + side, they can help make a site more attractive - especially good for when trying to attract new members.
On the - side, not only can they make a site slow loading, but editing site templates can mean having to re-edit them every [...]
Communities needs leadership
An interesting post from Creating Passionate Users highlights the issue of Collective Intelligence vs the Dumbness of Crowds.
The difference is very keen, and as a forum admin it’s something I’ve had to learn myself.
The basic gist is that Plato was right - benevolent dictators are very popular.
And, with online communities, if you’re a user and [...]
Ev1 servers scraping juggernaut
Well, I’d hate to sound too much like IncrediBill - but today I received nearly 9,000 emails to my Inbox - all vbulletin MySQL failure error messages.
Turns out someone at Ev1servers was hitting my comparative religion forum really hard and frequently maxing out the MySQL connections.
Took the site down for an hour in [...]
Bye bye Brian’s Business Blog
Platinax is currently undergoing redevelopment, and with that it’s time to say bye bye to Brian’s Business Blog.
The key reason?
It’s a crap blog.
I read various other blogs online, and the good ones are:
*fresh!
*informative!
*interesting!
I’ve managed to fail on all 3 here.
I have some excuse, though - since the last Platinax redevelopment I found myself separating the [...]
