For the purposes of this test I would like to recommend the following:

1) Only one or two Admin/Mods max
2) The domain for this should be kept under wraps and not exposed here on AF or at least not as the signature link for ryan with 8000+ posts

Here's why:

To truly establish the validity of this method (and I am interested) I think it is important to (in as much as possible) duplicate how it might work for someone without the immense support and leverage this forum offers Ryan for marketing his new URL. The average person will not have many hands popping up to moderate or 8000 visible forum signature links in one shot.

Just my two cents but certainly interested in the outcome.

Lastly I would like to see the site NOT use the keywords in the domain and test the effectiveness of the method for keyword ranking - this harkens back to the note Ryan made about hosting forum and ranking.

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Not a bad idea - and if you do put the keyword in the domain, try to rank for something other than what the domain is. Like if your domain is topicdiscussion.com try to rank for topic forums or something like that.

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Very valid points, Toucan.

Regarding the URL, I think that part of our test was going to determine how well a forum could perform with minimal advertising - but not zero advertising. While your average forum owner might not have 8,000 posts to place a signature in and might not run a community as large as AF to promote it, we're under the assumption that somebody doing this is going to have some money to promote it. In other words, when all is said and done, we'd be able to say something like "we achieved these results by placing the URL here, here, and here and spent $xxx on advertising". We're not going to send the URL out to all 6,000 of our members in a newsletter and we're not going to place banners and text links all over AF and everywhere else with it...but I do think that we're going to do basic promotion that would be expected with a project like this.

That said, there will not be much promotion. The general idea behind this is that a forum can essentially generate its own traffic off of search engines alone - not promotion.

We definitely won't hide the URL completely, because we want our members to be able to follow the progress...If nothing else, we will at least post the URL but not hyperlink it so that SE's follow it.

As far as the domain...it will use keywords. Again, we are to assume that anybody looking to use this strategy is going to do it with a domain that has keywords in it also. If we did not use keywords or did not work towards ranking well for those keywords, then we would not be using the "right" strategy.

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Right on. I concur that promotion is obvious and I appreciate you intend to promote on a level which reflects the average person's resources.

Regarding domain name - I'm not in disagreement that keyword rich domains are better, but it does undermine the ability to tell if the domain gains ranking based on the name or the service [which was a point of argument in the other thread].

Regardless I certainly wish you both success.

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I know what you mean about the domain, but again, our goal is to show you what can be done by the average person using the best strategies (that we are aware of )

The more that I think about it, the more that I realize that there will not be much promotion involved...the vast majority of the growth here should be the result of SEO and indexing by SE's...not by backlinks...granted, in order to get indexed, you need an initial few links for the SE's to find, but that's not at all hard to accomplish.

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Here is what I am interested in seeing because $99 is not that much money to get a successful forum started.
Once you set everything up, pay the $99 (in theory) for the 100,000 posts, DO THE SEO STUFF,how soon will the board be generating REAL posts, and a lot of real posts. See i understand the point behind adding the automated posts. I understand making the forum seem busy, but i am interested in seeing a forum that is both packed with posts and constantly growing with new posts from real members, then you build something that has long term income potential. And if spending the initial $99 and then a little bit per month creates this BOTH profitable AND busy forum (busy with real posting)...then it will be worth it for me

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Yep me again

So I have been sitting here in my office debating this whole concept to myself and then I thought…

What next? After you pay for this service and you get your 100K worth of post, then what? Do you just let it sit? You have a forum now with 100K worth of post and how many members? A couple of theses examples that were shown only had a minimal amount of members, with tons of post.

We as admins always preach to all the new administrators about how they should have fresh content or people won’t join.

Also, what will a moderator do? If these posts are auto-generated, what would they be used for, weeding out the duplicate threads and post?

So I guess this goes out to Cobby, Ryan, and the rest who have ordered this package. Curious to hear your responses. (ps I didn't read this whole thread)

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EDIT: This is in response to Sir TVDinner...replying to demojames now

Right on, that is ultimately what we plan on doing.

We have actually already decided on a domain name, and I'm going to start a new thread about that shortly...The forum will be about Windows Vista.

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let's guess and argue about the domain name. Just the The general mention of this topic lately gets you about 10 new pages of posts. so let's argue about that also, hahahahahahaha

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I think that most of your questions regarding "what do you do with the posts" can actually be found in the other thread from this post and on.

As far as the moderators are concerned...I have never done this before, obviously, but I think that there is a lot of moderation involved in cleaning up the posts as they come in. You will also, in theory, be receiving a lot of hits from search engines as the site is indexed which means that you will need to moderate new users as well. It's all new to me...so you and me included will be able to see why moderators are needed as it unfolds

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