>I was over there yesterday and saw that over 400 people were
>on the site at the same time! You guys are generating some
>traffic, to be sure. When ya gonna monitize it? LOL Hey John,
That's not really accurate. Since I "teach" marketing and this is a private membership forum, here's the truth:
vbulletin is has a weird accounting method.
We're actually getting about 300 unique visitors a day.
Out of that, I'm paying $5 a day to get 100 people a day from Squidoo at 5 cents each.
So, in reality we're now getting about 200 uniques a day for free. Since it's a forum, many of those are repeats from day to day.
We won't monetize it for quite a while. Our goal is to build a massive community first. Screw "niche", we want mass appeal, and in general, the content does appeal to "everyone".
I believe the domain itself www.Duelz.com is extremely brandable and a great asset.
Sidenote: Anyone notice I own both Tuelz.com and Duelz.com?
We're building a press release campaign, hoping we'll get picked up by the main media sometime and we'll be sending out release after relsease. We sent out our first about a week ago.
We added a plug in to enhance VB's RSS pheed. I submitted it to all the RSS directories.
Also, I took the RSS pheed and plugged it into a service at http://twitterfeed.com which reads the pheed then posts it two Twitter.
I got "greedy" with the first twitter account for duelz and got it banned using automated software.
I have slowed down the software and here's the Twitter account:
www.twitter.com/duelzcom
Again, updates to the Duelz forum are posted as tweets on the Twitter account. It's all hand-free.
I sought out political Twitt accounts like for Fox News, famous conservatives and liberals and am adding them as friends, which is our target market.
Not as many follow back as in the IM niche, but I am getting definite results from Twitter. I guess about 70 people per day from Twitter and I only started the duelzcom account two days ago.
I just run the friend adder and certain ammount of folks check out the site in the profile and others follow, then click on the links in the updates. It's about 50-50.
Again, this is almost all automated. As long as people post at the forum, all I need to do is run the software. And I'm getting tweets that they like the forum.
I submitted the Twitter account RSS pheed, ping and bookmark it. Now, the Duelz RSS pheed is essentially in all the RSS directories twice, but from different IPs.
I also use the same RSS pheed to create a Godfather mailing list. Using RSS pheeds, I have a "Today Pheed" email newsletter that's 100% on auto-pilot.
It contains:
10 Debate topics from Duelz
Yahoo News
Yahoo celebrity News
Today in history from wikipedia (I converted this to RSS and rotate each day)
This produces a great, interesting newsletter, and is another way to promote Duelz.
Also, when people sign up for Duelz, in the "agreement", folks agree that their posts become pubic domain. This is so the content can be used by anyone, anywhere. Hopefully, this will become viral.
I hope to do a lot of video down the road, as soon as I learn it. I think Duelz should do well getting traffic from videos. I'm going to try to do humor/animations.
Hope this can be of help to some with their campaigns...
-Boom boom boom boom.