Can you give us a brief background on yourself?

I'm 21, born September 24, 1985 in Huntsville, Alabama. I love animals, currently have 2 cats and a dog. Other than that not much else interesting. Played sports growing up and hung out with friends. I like to keep it simple


Tell us a little about your forum, Mustang Evolution.

The name has a double meaning. Most people see it as a catchy way to show how far the Mustang has come since it was introduced in 1964. While that did play a role in the name it also has a personal meaning. When I first started what has now become Mustang Evolution it was called Ford Mustang | Mustang Forums for Ford Mustang Enthusiasts. 232 is the size in cubic inches of the engine in the 1994-2004 V6 Mustangs. When I first started it I was 17 years old and my first car was a 1995 V6 Mustang. I went out on the net to look for information on it only to find two good sources for V6 Mustangs at the time, V6Power.net and 3.8mustang.com - The most popular v6 mustang resource on the web. Not being completely happy with either and me always wanting to start my own forum and website I started Ford Mustang | Mustang Forums for Ford Mustang Enthusiasts. Over time the site changed names several times, Ford Mustang | Mustang Forums for Ford Mustang Enthusiasts > V6 Mustang | Forums for V6 Mustang Enthusiasts > Mustang-Forums.com > Mustangevolution.com. However, don't think I am smart enough to just think of Mustang Evolution on my own. A christmas present gave me the push in the right direction. I have this poster: Mustang - Evolution Poster at Art.com hanging on my wall. In 2004 when I wasn't happy with having a domain with a hypen in it I set out to find the one domain I could be happy with so that I could brand myself in the Mustang community. One day I just happened to glance to m right, at the time, while trying to come up with a name and saw the poster and it clicked.

The rest, as they say, is history (a rather messy one).


Mustang Evolution is in a very competitive niche. What did you do differently to keep yourself separated from the big guys (StangNet, Corral, and more)?

I make it personal. I talk to many of my members on aim and have met almost all of my staff and supporting members in person. Being an Automotive site, especially one with such tradition as the Mustang, it makes for an easy way to meet the people who make up your forum through car meets all over the country. I make it a goal to travel to as many Mustang meets as I can throughout the year. We have organized meets and vacations for members of ME to South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and I have even had one of my members fly in from New Jersey to one of our meets in my town. I don't see this changing in the future. As we grow we have no plans to exclude anyone. We would love to see our meets grow and allow us to organize even bigger meets across the country.


What revenue streams bring Mustang Evo the most income?

Google Adsense is my number one income source, followed by Intellitxt and Tribal Fusion. Those three companies are my bread and butter.


What does the future hold for Mustang Evolution?

The one thing that I really want to continue to imrpove is my Google referrals. Google places a lot of weight on site authority and with my niche it is hard to squeeze yourself in with the big dogs. I plan to continue building backlinks as often as possible and continue to build a solid member base. We are only 100k posts away from 500,000 so that is something we are going to be working on achieving as well.


How many hours per day would you say you spend on Mustang Evo?

8-10 hours Monday - Thursday. Very little on the weekends.


How is this time spent (% you spend on things such as posting, moderating, maintenance, advertising, planning, etc.)?

I spend most of the time posting and surfing the site to make sure everything is working correctly. I also spend a lot of time browsing webmaster and forum admin forums looking for new things to try out to improve my forums. I do very little marketing. When I get a new news item before others I send out news tips to blogs like Autoblog.com and Jalponik. I have been featured on Autoblog numerous times and Jalponik a couple of times. It helps builds backlinks due to their popularity.

As far as moderating there really isn't much to moderate as my forum
sits now. Moderators usually take care of the blatant spammers and petty
arquements. It's pretty laid back, especially since the most active
members have met someone from the site at least once.


What do you do to relax, or get away from Mustang Evolution?

Nothing really different than most people who want to get away from their "job". I hang out with friends on weekends. I try to visit a few friends that go to college out of town and such ever now and then. During Football season I find College Football to be a great escape from reality for a day. I'm also a big TV show guy. I watch 24, Heroes, Lost, Dexter, The Dead Zone and many other TV shows religously. Helps take my mind off of my life for a bit.


You are a huge supporter of vBSEO and SEO. Convince me in just a couple sentences why I should be as well.

The majority of people who run forums have competition. Some of these forums are up against boards that have been around 7-10 years. 7-10 years gives even the poorest SEO'd board an advantage over a new start up. I believe that anyone who is looking to improve their chances at increasing their traffic to their site needs to look into SEO long and hard and take every kind of step possible to gain an advantage in such a competitive market. Proper SEO includes removing duplicate content and links and after doing so working on building quality links to your optimized urls and pages. I'm talking about pure white hat SEO here. You do your job on your end of optimizing your site properly and building it with quality content and in the long run your site will perform well considering you have also taken the time to make it worth your visitors time to stick around for more than one visit. SEO is just a part of a big picture. You have to make sure you cover everything to get the most out of your SEO work, or your design work. I hope that makes sense. That is how I look at it. It's more than just SEO. It's the big picture and having everything come together in the end to accelerate your forum into big board status.

If you remove enough periods from the above novel you'll eventually get two sentences.


What do you think forums will look like in 5 years?

I don't see a whole lot of change in the way that people interact. I think the posting layout will stay the same. I don't really see anything major wrong with the current format, although long threads can get a bit overwhelming. What I do think will change is the transition to better web standards for forums. Using CSS rather than tables where it makes sense. Making better use of new technologies such as PHP 5 and MySQL 5. I think with vBulletin 4 we will see a major imrpovement in those things. Performance will be greatly increased reducing the costs for forum admins and increasing profits. For those not interested in making money off their forum the reduced load the software will put on your server will only encourage you to further promote your forum without it hitting your pockets hard. I'm a big believer in performance over features.


What is the most common mistake you see other forum owners making?

Not being passionate about their forum subject. I really believe that to be truly successful and have the least amount of issues with your forum you have to make your sites personal and about something you are really interested in. When I go into a new forum or site I always try to put myself in the users shoes and think about what they would like and how I can make everything easier for them.

I also believe that you should be active within the Forum admin communities and network. A lot of the money I have made today is because of relationships built with other webmasters.


What advice would you give new forum owners?

No matter how saturated your forum topic is you can stand out if you want to bad enough. It's not going to be easy though. Hard work does pay off in the end.


What has been your biggest regret or mistake as a forum owner?

I can't think of one that stands out as a huge one. Nothing that has set me back drastically atleast. My biggest flaw that I have been working on to improve is patience. I believe if I had more patience in the past on certain things I would be a better position today. I have come a long way though. Anyone that knew me back in High School knew me and patience didn't go together at all.


What does the future hold for you?

I have no idea. Which leaves me both excited and nervous. I have never been a fan of school. I hate it actually. I've spent the last 2 1/2 years of my life taking absolute bs classes that have NOTHING to do with what I want to learn which is either computer networking or programming. It's frustrating but thankfully I have people around me that support what I am trying to do.


Firefox or Internet Explorer?

Firefox. I despise IE6. I hate designing my sites and viewing them in IE7 and Firefox and then going to the laptop to check them out in IE6 only to find that it is completely trashed. So at least IE7 was improved in that aspect. It's still too limiting though. I love the flexibility of Firefox and could careless how much memory it uses. I'd rather buy more ram for Firefox than use IE haha.


Tell us something interesting we don't already know about you.

The only "real" job I have ever had was working on the inside at a local Dominos Pizza. One year I entered a Pizza making challenege and was the fastest person to make three pizzas in my store region so I won a trip to Atlanta to compete in the Southeast regionals. I didn't make the cut there but won 300 dollars in the process. The grand prize was 5,000 dollars.


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