Ideas for encouraging people to join open networks

[Traddie]

I am thinking of opening up my site from just the front page being visible to allowing people to access it all. However I was thinking of making the members tab and a few other sub tabs to do with album reviews etc being members only ( Mine is a music site )

By closing off a couple of tabs I can therefore put a notice on the main page saying " Join up for access to the members files, chat, album reviews etc", thereby encouraging people to join. I do this in order to improve my google rankings and general SEO, and fear opening the site will result in people only viewing not joining.

Will this work in your opinion in helping rankings and getting people to join, and do you have any other ideas that would persuade people to join ?

[pjcyto]

It should. If you give people an incentive to come in to the site, they usually will. For me, I have a page set aside to show the 4 things we have that are unique to our type of network. It explains a little bit of what we do and that's it. I use that page as the "promotion" page. In other words, that's the link I send people or the link from the ads I have. You might want to try something similar for announcing what is behind the curtain. 

[Traddie]

Hi.

Can you provide your network url so I can have a look?

[Patrick Chappelle]

You can set any page to be visible to members only by adjusting your settings in the Tab Manager.

[Tyler Durbin]

I have had really good success using Wordpress as my front end and putting Ning on a subdomain.  This way, I can control key words and seo to get people to my site. 

[Traddie]

Hi Tyler

Can you provide your site url?