In the U.S., today is Labor Day, a day that for many marks the symbolic end of summer. With this in mind, I thought it would be fitting to touch on a couple of things going on at ET. In the past 2 months, we’ve surpassed our 1,000th blog post, 220th article in the article database, made a ton of changes on the site, and moved in to our 7th year in publication on the web. All this is great, but as we move forward, and especially now since I’ve left my day job and can give the site the tender love and care it deserves, I want to increase the site’s popularity and quality of discussion and content. Right now we’ve got a handful of active members but not what we had 2 years ago when forum discussion was at it’s peak. The registrations for membership still come in at the same rate and Google Analytics reports say we get as many visitors as ever….so why hasn’t discussion picked up accordingly? The 2 points I just mentioned means we’ve got a lot of lurkers on the site. By lurkers, I mean non-members who don’t contribute to the community. I want to make a call to all of you out there (you know who you are!) to actually join in on the discussion. And for all members who are active, let’s keep it going. The Olympics and the recent increase in blog posts has picked up the pace a little on the forum but I’d like to make a call for suggestions from what else can be done. Here’s some thoughts I’ve been tossing around:
- Make certain parts of the site (maybe the forum? maybe the article database?) off-limits to all lurkers (non-members and members with 0 forum posts). The thought would be to force those who don’t contribute to give and take rather than just take.
- Make the entire site password protected to contributing members only.
- Make an incentive program for bloggers for any blog entry that generates 10+ forum posts.
- Make an incentive program for original posters for any blog entry that generates 20+ forum posts.
- Make an incentive program for referrals.
- Contests that involve the community.
- Adding more videos to the site.
- Adding more videos to the site.
- Suggestion box for blog entry content.
- More blog entry content.
- More frequent additions to the article database.
- Adding social features to the site.
What do you think? What does the site most need. All criticisms and suggestions will be considered. Rank the top 3 things we need to get things going on here and if anything seems off-track don’t hesitate to say so.
Discuss entry