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Visits Versus Community on Ning - Using Google Analytics to understand engagement

There's a lot of info on the web about using Google Analytics to understand what's happening on your website, but I want to focus today on something that's incredibly simple: The difference between TRAFFIC and ENGAGED TRAFFIC, or to put it another wa

How To Customize the Welcome Box Rectangle

HOW TO CUSTOMIZE THE WELCOME BOX TEXT:

When a new member joins your Ning Network, they will see the new Ning Welcome Box. Note: Once your new member closes this box by clicking on the "X", it is no longer displayed.

You can customize the Welcome Bo

How To Add Custom Google Search

In the past I installed Google Search the hard way. It took special coding with new page for results, and several jumping through hoops.

NOW, Google offers an easy way to add a custom Google Search to your Ning Network.

Go here:
http://www.google.c

How to bring more traffic to the site !

Please advice me on how to attract new members to my site.

http://waldendoctoralcommunity.ning.com/

Scroll Bar for Latest Activity on Home Page

I'm not too much into the scrolling comments walls, and such. But this particular little tweak, I like a lot. It will add a vertical scroll bar to your Latest Activity module on the home page. If you only have 4 postings selected, the bar may not sho

Broadcast Message Best Practices

Don't Send Too Many Broadcast Messages:
Be careful not to flood your members with Broadcast Messages. This could cause them to opt out of receiving broadcast emails from your Ning Network.

Incl

Advice on creating a directory of resources for your community?

Hey everyone -

Does anyone have advice on the best way to organize a large amount of resource information for your community? An ideal situation would be a database you could search by location, but even just simple sections would suffice. I don't k

Design Inspiration

When designing a Ning Network, sometimes the best inspiration can come from fellow Network Creators. Let us know your favorite Ning Networks and design tips here!

Do We Need Our Own Disclaimers & Terms

Do we need our own disclaimers & terms.I know it is easy enough to make a page with our own terms and disclaimers, but do we need to do this?I'm wondering if the links at the bottom of my network cover me and all of the content being created on my ne

What information must my disclaimer include to keep from being sued?

I started my network a couple months ago. Recently, one of my new members is someone who also runs a Ning network. She said that it is a very important for me to have a disclaimer so that I don't get sued for millions of dollars! I plan to contact my

Viral Loops: how do you get your members to help you grow your network?

I just finished reading the book "Viral Loop" by Adam Penenberg (here's the review I wrote about it). In one of the chapters, the author goes in depth about Ning and Ning's "double viral loop": we're all users of networks and all users of networks ar

NING and sustainable development

Many have whispered it, some have called out loud: NING is the future of (social) networking. The concept: micro-local or hyper-local networking. Building local communities with a global exposure.I'm helping out volunteers that want to come and work

How are you using Broadcast Messages?

Hi!Now that Ning supports HTML for broadcast messages and lets you send yourself a preview, are you sending more broadcast messages to your members? When have you found broadcast messages to be most useful and effective?I'm interested in any success

Share your Analytics lessons

So, I thought I'd kick off a topic sharing some of our Analytics lessons from the past couple of months. Here's how the # of visits for TuDiabetes looks like for October and November 2009:

In the screenshot from Google Analytics, you can see the d

Adding tags - need advice

I am working on optimizing content on my site ahead of opening up the content for Google to be able to crawl it. I have been going back to every blog post and image that members have added to try to add relevant tags that Google will find, but I real

How To Apply Network Theme/Design to Another Ning Network

This question was asked earlier. I thought it may be a good thing to offer this information as a Discussion under: Designing and creating a Ning Network.

Here's your situation: You've created a Ning Network, and your Design is perfect. You want to u

Getting people to join a new network

I wonder if anyone here has come up with an effective way to get people to join a completely new network. Nobody wants to join a network that has only a handful of members - but every network has to have 5 members before it can have 500 or 5,000. I h

increasing registration: keep all open or just homepage

I am wondering what everyone thinks about the pros and cons of keeping just the homepage visible for prospective members. My primary target right now is membership registrations and I do not know if it is better to keep the network closed so that peo

Twitter/Facebook buttons?

Does anyone know how to integrate one of those small banners that has buttons and links to Twitter / Facebook / RSS etc? I tried using a Twitter button generator, got the code and pasted in a text box on my homepage but the image did not show up, I o

Market your Ning Network with Twitter

Some of you may know my name from reading the Ning Blog, but I also run the @Ning Twitter account as part of my job as a Marketing Manager at Ning. If you and your members are posting engaging, interesting and current content on your Ning Network, ch