A Way to Boost Membership

[gid]

You should start a directory at the root where only member in good standing can submit to.  It would be a great way to build backlinks for the members plus people will join and stick around if they know they are working for good links for their projects.  
Maybe once someone has been a member for three months and has a certain number of posts, then they can be listed on the directory page.

[yourweb]

Your talking about listing the website only, right?

[MuNKy]

Could be a good idea! Wouldnt it have to be on a different domain though otherwise it wont really do much as we already have the backlinks from the sigs?

[ash]

We did have a directory once but it was open to all and sundry and became a nightmare to manage.

I'm aware the site couple do with a radical overhaul from top to bottom, but its a case of what exactle do the users want? I was thinking something along the lines of the following:

User managed blog on root, where users can submit webmaster related articles and the like, or popular forum topics could be 'upgraded to the blog'. As a group we can help promote the blog with stumbles, Digg's comments links etc etc.

Revised forum, few extra features, PHPBB3 (or Vbulletin?) and an overall theme for the whole site. Adsense sharing reenabled!

Directory

Useful tools

What do you guys think? If the site is to have a major overhaul i feel its important to re-monetise the site, so that contributers ie anyone who helps work on the site can be compensated (albeit a small amount for their time and effort) and funds can be reinvested to outsaource work that any of the members cannot cover!

[gid]

User managed blog on root, where users can submit webmaster related articles and the like, or popular forum topics could be 'upgraded to the blog'. As a group we can help promote the blog with stumbles, Digg's comments links etc etc.

I do like the idea, but it seems it would be a bit of work for someone to be moving hot forum topics to the front page.  As far as the blog goes, I guess if I was doing SEO work for hire then having articles published would be a good source of clients.

Revised forum, few extra features, PHPBB3 (or Vbulletin?) and an overall theme for the whole site. Adsense sharing reenabled!

Sure I like the idea of making money, but I am not sure how important the sharing is.  I feel I get enough just on backlinks, and a directory would further that.  

Directory

I like the idea, and would throw some PR at it.  Maybe we could accept some link from those who aren’t members for a nice price.   I like the idea of profit sharing on that, but man how do you split that up?

Useful tools

I know we have talked about this before, and I have a tool that is 50% completed that I was going to share with you and here at TIP.

[ash]

User managed blog on root, where users can submit webmaster related articles and the like, or popular forum topics could be 'upgraded to the blog'. As a group we can help promote the blog with stumbles, Digg's comments links etc etc.

I do like the idea, but it seems it would be a bit of work for someone to be moving hot forum topics to the front page.  As far as the blog goes, I guess if I was doing SEO work for hire then having articles published would be a good source of clients.

i don't think it would just be SEO, it could be general webmaster articles, onloine marketing, monetising, content creation, and anything webmaster related would be acceptable. We can also leverage social networking to get more visits to the site and hopefully more members will sign up too!

Revised forum, few extra features, PHPBB3 (or Vbulletin?) and an overall theme for the whole site. Adsense sharing reenabled!

Sure I like the idea of making money, but I am not sure how important the sharing is.  I feel I get enough just on backlinks, and a directory would further that.  

I think the move would be part of an overall redesign to bring all the parts together under one template and a more professional look would surely only enhance the user experience.

Directory

I like the idea, and would throw some PR at it.  Maybe we could accept some link from those who aren’t members for a nice price.   I like the idea of profit sharing on that, but man how do you split that up?

No idea! Yes perhaps a paid directory but members could earn 'free' submissions either by gifts from the admin team, for good posts or something and / or by number of posts etc.

Useful tools

I know we have talked about this before, and I have a tool that is 50% completed that I was going to share with you and here at TIP.

yes, we have its really a matter of finding a) people willing to contribute to say the forums blog and b) people to help with time and skills to the tech side of things

My comments above are in bold. See Tim's post also, interesting idea.

[dazsim]

The social networking idea jumped out at me.  The idea that we could network in the same way as you might use facebook(big buzz at the moment about this one in the uk), faceparty, bebo or myspace with an SEO/business slant would be awesome.  Sounds like a big job though and it'd need to integrate with TIP, integrate with whatever blogging/article software you'd be sing, and be easily expandable as we come up with more ideas for the site.  Its a shame you cant incentivise getting links to the site as that would amount to paid links  

Keep the ideas rolling in

Darren

[tnash]

perhaps something as simple as expanding the profiles page,
making them more seo friendly i.e user/tnash, plus a section for specialities or services offered.

If we intergrated this into the main site so a meet user x style column