The problem was I tried to install it once on a older site and host, and OpenX and my hosting account were not getting along.

Along comes a new way to use OpenX. You can now sign up to enter a beta program for OpenX Hosted. This is a basic version of the OpenX platform, but you sign up on their site and they host the program. So far I enjoy it, and it makes life much easier by keeping all of my sites in a single location when it comes to advertising and campaigns. I highly recommend signing up for the beta and trying it out yourself if you’re looking for a Ad Management system. The only problem I’ve ran into so far was I had a 15 minute period of time at around 1am this past week that the system must have been down. This slowed loading on my pages dramatically, but I have not had any other problems with it since then. This could be from an update OpenX was doing to their platform.

Original Article: OpenX Hosted

I’m just a regular guy, who researched a bit of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics, and then ran across vBSEO and thought it looked interesting but couldn’t get over the price.  About 5 months after my forum started I bit the bullet and bought the software for my Camaro & Firebird site.

I installed vBSEO on August 13th, 2007.  I’ve had some up and downs since then, but one thing that has never gone down during this time is search engine referrals (especially google).

Since I installed Google Analytics only 2 and a half months before the install of vBSEO I can understand why skeptics could be a bit turned off by the above graph.

However, this one gives real proof

When a Forum that is little over 1 year old and has only 700 members is ranking higher on almost all terms than forums with 10′s of thousands of members and 5+ years online, something is working well.

Sure, I’ve done other things to help my search engine rankings as everyone should.  No one states that vBSEO or any other SEO product is a magic install that just works and you can leave your site stagnant for 1 year and then blame them when it goes wrong.  However, I am no SEO Expert, just a guy who started a site online, read some free articles and watched some videos, talked with others and am now on the top of google (for a few terms-more will come with time).  I see the price tag of vBSEO now and wouldn’t think twice of buying a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th license if I had the forums that needed it.

Original Article: vBSEO 10 Month Review

I’m not a big bookworm to be honest (not at all really) but this book caught my attention as I haven’t seen anything like it yet. I sat down with it at Barnes and Noble to see if I thought it’d be worth the time and money in buying and reading it. I was impressed at the detail that Patrick goes into for just about everything you need to know to own and manage a forum.
The book details many of the tough topics such as moderation, problem users, guidelines, and much more. Patrick gives many of his real-life examples and tips he’s gained through almost a decade of forum management. You’re most likely not going to agree with Patrick on all of his issues, but he explains his reasoning and tactics so that you can at least see and decide what will work for your and your community.

I’m about 3/4 of the way through the book as of right now and enjoy the read so far. I definitely suggest any Administrator gets this, or at least gives it a try. It’s got something for just about any level administrator-whether you’re still brainstorming a community you’d like to grow, or already have a booming forum.

I’ll update this as I finish the book.

Original Article: Managing Online Forums Book Review

What Changed?

1. User Profiles
   • Probably the most noticeable change is the display of the User Profiles.  The new Tabbed view with a sidebar to the right with friends lists, albums, etc… is a nice touch and a bit more interesting than the boring 3.6 profiles.
2. User Albums
   • This could have been a great feature (and I hope it will be soon), but it seemed to be added at the last second as a selling point with absolutely no depth or options to really control how albums are displayed.  This could have been the best part of 3.7, but it is actually one of the weakest points of the new build.  You can read more about it below.
3. Friends/Contacts
   • The Friends list is much more pronounced now with avatars of 6 of your friends showing to the right on your profile page.  Most users never even noticed a “Friends list” before 3.7, but they have displayed it the correct way now to gain exposure on each forum for networking.

To get back on my soapbox about the User Albums.  It just seems like vBulletin developers didn’t seem to take the album seriously during development.  There are many oversights that have people on vbulletin.com’s community forums begging for new features, and I think I’m going to start doing it as well.

So what are the oversights?

1. Very, Very Primitive Admin Options.
2. Can’t search public Albums
3. No “All Albums” Viewer for public albums (search vbulletin.org for a mod to allow for this)
4. No “Upload from URL” option that is common among vBulletin uploading, as well as just about any other web album app
5. No option to Rebuild Album pictures (Probably the most important of the list)
6. No BBCode in Album Overview Text, but its allowed in comments?
7. Why Can’t an admin add a Album to a users profile?

   I’m sure I’ll think of more later on and add to the list…

My overall  thoughts are that vBulletin 3.7.0 is an improvement over 3.6, however specific areas need some adjustments and tweaking to make them more user-friendly in my opinion.  I was very excited to see albums included, but really… they weren’t

Original Article: Thoughts on vBulletin 3.7.0 Gold

ADSDAQ CPM Advertising

I’ll update with some stats and fill rates for different prices later.

Original Article: ADSDAQ – CPM advertising

Anyways, This will be a in-depth look at how vBSEO has affected our search engine rankings from August 15th until now on F-Body Online.

First, we’ll compare the search engine stats from July 15th through August 15th, and compare them to August 16th through September 15th.


As you can see, HUGE differences in the amount of traffic generated by search engines.

Now we’ll look at Month 1(8/16-9/15) with vBSEO and Month 2(9/16-10/15) with vBSEO

As you can see, Google actually went down a bit, but Yahoo! began to really pick up the pace on their side to help me along. Overall, I did get a 3.29% Increase over Month 1 with vBSEO so I still consider it a success there as well. It should also be noted that vBSEO shouldn’t completely catch on until around the 4 month mark so we’re half way there. I’ll keep you updated with new stats each month.

Original Article: vBSEO review – 2 months

Not only have my Rankings for Google, Yahoo, Live, and MSN all over tripled, I’ve also been getting more traffic that wants to be here . Before vBSEO was installed during a month I was averaging about 3 pages/visit, in the month and 10 days since, I’m averaging 7.5 pages/visit.

I am now in the top 10 in google for “f body forums” and top 15 for many other similar phrases like f-body forum and others.

Original Article: vBSEO is worth the price!

Since installing their script and waiting for offers for text links, I’ve gotten nothing in about 2 weeks. Now I know that F-Body Online isn’t a huge forum, but they are supposed to price your links “according” to your traffic. However it seems it might be too high at $15.00 a month for a forum with only 175 members. That is why I suspect I am not getting any offers as of yet. I’ll keep it around a bit longer, and see if I can lower the price after that but I don’t see the ability to.

If that doesn’t work, I’ll be trying LinkWorth for the same amount of time and giving you an update for their services.

It seems selling text links on your own may be worth the effort and cost savings from what I am initially gathering here. Browsing through their publisher listings it looks like a large majority of the $15.00 ads have no offers or ads currently running. Maybe that should be a red-flag for the TLA staff to check into maybe offering something lower, or just not accepting smaller sites and wasting their time.

Original Article: Text-Link-Ads update

Original Article: Linkworth Text links

While I can’t say how good they are with payouts and things yet, because I have just been approved and added the needed code to my forumhome template, TLA gives you a price they think is reasonable for links on your site through an equation that I don’t know the specifics of. So basically it is now a waiting game for advertisers to pick up my site and start advertising.

I’ll make sure to keep you updated with new posts about TLA as I get more information.

Original Article: Recently signed up for Text-Link-Ads