I know there have been post on why not to send your users to facebook and I may have mis read or not understood but one thing I know for sure is that we are starting to see more members and people actually blogging more on our site then ever before. In the last 2 days we got 11 people to join. We have been trying hard to control the spam so I would say maybe 2 out of the 11 could be spammers but most we can see that they like our page on facebook.
Make it simple and put in the work to talk to people who like your page on FB, invite them to join your Ning site. With the new like page profile update you can see and do allot more. Everyone who likes our page we "TRY" to send them a thank you and to check out our NING site. On our ning we ask how did they hear about SwurvRadio and guess what they say :) not myspace....If you don't put in the work to get people to your site stop complaining about nobody coming to your site. I'm personally up at 6am daily promoting, engaging and networking...We are not even close to this is 50 or sites like that but I can see the fruit of my team as well as my labor.
I can't remember this guys name but he was a great programmer that I met in SF years ago at some apple convention and he said "if you don't break it your not gonna know how to fix it" Basically try everything...look at what other sites are doing and do what they are doing but make it your own. Do it better. Try something different do research on your competitor, google 100 sites like yours and look at what they are doing and see what you can do to stand out.
When we first started I had over 200 employees and I personally spent more money developing Swurv over that past 6 years than I thought I would. Paying a programmer thousands for a site that never got developed I had to think how can we have some sort of online presence and along came NING. We aggressively put our site together and within days we have almost 2-300 people join and it went nuts from there. But that wasn't because we didn't Hustle. We got out and promoted with flyers and word of mouth and just about anything we could do to get where we are today. I can honestly say I'm almost as excited about The new ning as I was when we first got on the platform. Whatever kind of site you have, if you believe in it...DO NOT WAIT FOR PEOPLE TO COME TO YOUR SITE, MAKE THEM! GO GET EM! BREAK SOMETHING & figure out how to fix it..You might Discover something new.
I know I'm rambling now but I hope this helps anyone struggling with there site. I always tell my djs "I would rather have 1 really good dj than 35 who don't do Shit" How many ever members you have treat them like they are #1 and they will bring people to your site"
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You are so right on point. I started a high school alumni site. I had first started a very basic HTML site back in 1999 for my class only. Then some years later, as folks knew my class had a website - instead of them getting their own, they asked if I would share their information. The good thing was I had a domain name that was only related to the school and not specifically to my class year. From there, I ended up re-vamping the site and using Joomla. When I did that I got a lot more people. By February 2008 when I launched the Ning site, I started with about 920 email addresses I had accumulated over the year. Man, with in a couple days I had 300 and today, I have over 7,611 members! Not all of them went to the school, but lived in the community at one time or another. So now the site has groups for all of the elementary schools, the middle school, damn near every street in this small city has a group! OMG, it's huge.
As of February 15, 2011 - look at this:
13,595,098 Pageviews
210,712 Absolute Unique Visitors
953,774 Visits / 871.03 Visits / Day
And there are:
77,872 photos
663 videos
9,826 music files
2,157 forum topics
861 blogs
263 groups
All that for a high school/community website! And, it's a predominantly BLACK neighborhood with a not so good reputation. But, the members are proud of their community. They nicknamed me The Weblady because of that site. I started a series of other schools, but those schools didn't take off like the first one so I finally shut them down because I couldn't pay for them.
You gotta continue to try new things, even if it's just reformatting or something, just to make them come back. Don't give up... like they say, "If you build it, they will come." And they will and they did.