My niche is with penny pinchers and im wondering how do i find that particular market. I know the market is big, and very loyal, but how exactly would anyone suggest i find more of them online for my new forum.

Advice?

I have tried a contest, submitted to forum directories, and i post as much as my time allows. Im probably just getting impatient, i do have members joining almost daily, but alas they are not posting. I am wondering how can i get active members, not just member registrations.

Thanxs in advance.
;D

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I'm in need of a forum helper who can do design work, install or repair MODS, and minor forum alterations for me. Pay is per project. Please PM me.

For that kind of forum, people are going to be looking for freebies, coupons, etc. all the time. You need to give them as much of this information as you can. Find a way to post deals like nobody's business. If you can find any RSS feeds, that would be great. Try to create a central place your members can go to where they are sure to stay updated on all the latest deals.

Have you been to sites such as http://www.fatwallet.com http://www.slickdeals.net and http://www.anything4free.com ? Look at them for examples....they have obviously hit this market in a big way, so try to find out what they are doing and follow in their shoes. That said, it would still be a good idea to provide something that these sites do not.

Your kind of site would be a good one to advertise also...flashy banners with FREE all over them and what not. Everybody is always looking for free stuff, no matter who you are...I don't know exactly where you advertise this kind of thing...but to be honest with you, you might want to look into advertising via a pop-up network somewhere. That seems to be where the majority of "free stuff" ads are, and I'm sure they get the attention of many people. Nobody likes pop-ups, that's for sure - but, we're not talking about putting them on your site, we're talking about letting somebody else put them on theirs.

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Good points.

I am quite familiar with the sites you mentioned above, as i am a big fan of them all, SD in particular, i post on a daily basis to my forum. As far as the RSS suggestion, from where would the feeds come from? Which sites? I dont want to copy the sites mentioned above.

Im not sure on the flashy banners...but i definitely do want to make some design & style modifications and add some more features. I just need alot of help with that stuff.

I agree on differentiating myself from them somehow. I guess, i must put my creative cap on.

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I'm in need of a forum helper who can do design work, install or repair MODS, and minor forum alterations for me. Pay is per project. Please PM me.

I did a very quick search on google (you will want to do the same, but more thorough) and found 3 places that might have good potential feeds for deals

http://dealnews.com/rss.html
http://www.dealcatcher.com/coupons~view_type=43
http://www.dealdude.com/index.php?action=9&id=22

I'm not sure if you're aware of how RSS feeds work, but it is basically a script that you link to that comes from another site. This script will provide you with the latest news/updates from this other site. I'm not sure if there is an included feature with phpBB, but with IPB I can set RSS feeds to automatically create new topics when they receive news. You can see examples of this in the individual software forums here (phpBB, vB, IPB) by a poster named "Industry News"

I would definitely look into those...perhaps create a forum just for these feeds called "Straight From the Wire", "Hot Off The Press"...or something like that

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Does phpbb accept RSS feeds? I found one i think i would like to add to my forum, do i need to install a news reader like NewsGator to my forum?

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I'm in need of a forum helper who can do design work, install or repair MODS, and minor forum alterations for me. Pay is per project. Please PM me.

I dont know exactly how you would do it with phpBB, but I did another quick search and found these two results

http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=144548
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=130271

Either of those will probably get the job done, but you should research/test both to find which one is best for you

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BTW, i like the site design & banner of dealdude.com, that is funny stuff. My forums rolemodel is more like slickdeals than dealdude, though. Hey, that is a good new thread topic. Which site or forum is yours modeled after? I'll post it elsewhere as a new topic.

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I'm in need of a forum helper who can do design work, install or repair MODS, and minor forum alterations for me. Pay is per project. Please PM me.

looks good. i will look into those mods, when i have more time. thanxs cadence.

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I'm in need of a forum helper who can do design work, install or repair MODS, and minor forum alterations for me. Pay is per project. Please PM me.

Sure, let us know how it goes

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This one is the content syndicator. It creates RSS feeds out of your content. I haven't used this.

This one I've installed. It imports RSS feeds and creates posts with an account and in the forum you specify. It's made to use a Cron job to do it automatically, but you can also just click the Get News link in the ACP if you can't get the cron to work (I couldn't).

The mod works very well, but it is a very involved install as phpbb mods go. Once it's running though the control panel and ease of use makes the install well worth it.

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