Promoting the site

[Gary J Fischman]

Any suggestions on how we can promote the site to start gaining traffic?

1) I'll toss links on Miata.net and Mazda-speed.com
2) I may place an ad on Google Ads
3) Ask your friends to help start this new community.
4) ?

[wrusprod]

how about these sites:

mazdaspeeders.com
clubRoadster.net

[Gary J Fischman]

What about 'em?

[wrusprod]

um....tossing links on those sites also.....just trying to help..you did ask for suggestions right?

[ragtop girl]

Those sites are owned by others and Gary would need permission to link to this site.

[Gary J Fischman]

Right - I mean, if people want to put links in their signatures on the other sites, that would be great. :)

[royborg009]

I have some suggestions.

On the miata.net forum, there have been many members who have taken pains to research and write up great posts about some mod or observation or what not, only for the thread to get lost in the archives. Often search engines have a hard time properly indexing forum pages because the threads may be too long or the page not properly formatted for optimal SEO.

An better alternative would be to implement a blog application which is basically just a content management system. You can start the content using some of the older/valuable forum posts, with the author's permission of course, and from there open it up to various authors as well as submissions from members. Rather than use comments on the blog, you can use the forum and create a thread for each blog post to continue the discussion. I think you'd cut down a lot of repetitive threads by providing something for people to react to rather than have a open forum. Of course, you can also keep the open forum in addition to the blog.

The benefit of a blog vs forum is that you can provide RSS, trackbacks etc which essentially drive traffic back to your site.

Here's an example (not a car site but one that successfully uses blog and forum together):
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/

[Gary J Fischman]

Interesting idea. Thanks.

[Gary J Fischman]

Any other suggestions on how to start getting some traction on the site? We need to start seeing activity. How else can we drive traffic here?

[NewB]

Any other suggestions on how to start getting some traction on the site? We need to start seeing activity. How else can we drive traffic here?

Adding it to sigs is probably the best bet.

Can i put "mazdachat.net -Endorsed by Gary J. Fischman" in my profile?

[Gary J Fischman]

Adding it to sigs is probably the best bet.

Can i put "mazdachat.net -Endorsed by Gary J. Fischman" in my profile?

I'd leave out the "Endorsed by" part. Thanks, though. :)

[Gary J Fischman]

Not much activity over the past week. I've placed an ad on Google. What else can we do to gain some traction?

[cptvictor03]

Gary,

I've got three cars over on Car Domain and didn't realize that I could bookmark. So I've added mazdachat in my profile.

Interestingly, there is this one guy who seems to be on a campaign on spamming everyone, or maybe it is part of the websites normal culture (I'm new on it) that people sign guest books and say something like:

great car, check mine out and tell me what you think?

I'd be willing to run a similar grassroots campaign and point people towards the site. If I did that would I be spamming and get my profile rejected? That is my only concern. Other than that, over 2,000 Mazda 3 owners, I can start hitting 20-30 a day for the next "X" months.

--Victor

[Gary J Fischman]

No - please don't resort to that. It just pisses people off.

[hobie237]

Interestingly, there is this one guy who seems to be on a campaign on spamming everyone, or maybe it is part of the websites normal culture (I'm new on it) that people sign guest books and say something like:

great car, check mine out and tell me what you think?
--Victor

Normal culture. It's how they pump each others' ratings up. "I'll rate you a 5 if you rate me a 5" and the whole thing becomes quite pointless, which is why I deleted my page there after about a week.

[cptvictor03]

Ok. Well hopefully things will get better for the site.