Comments on: What I Learned by Increasing My Forum Membership by 400 in 24 hours

By: Masterrofilm

Masterrofilm — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 12:59:40 +0000

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By: Joel Strellner

Joel Strellner — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:27:26 +0000

Hey Darren,

I really liked this post, it made me think of a few things.

Is there any chance you could post the email that you sent out to your unverified subscribers?

Thanks,
Joel Strellner

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:29:53 +0000

I did something similar and setup a small goal for myself to create a newsletter signup at my saving money website for Australians at;

http://www.savingsguide.com.au

and within1 week, I had 150 subscribers who I will start to email regularly with updates and latest posts and competitions.

Not bad!

By: Ryan McLean

Ryan McLean — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:11:55 +0000

This is really cool. I think you would have gotten an even better response if you offered people an extra incentive to join the forum. Like a competition or something. Then you definately could have landed that 500 new members in just 24 hours.
The problem is you can’t do this every day. How often can you do this?

By: J.D. Meier

J.D. Meier — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 20:34:06 +0000

I like your lesson – leverage your network.

By: NATASHA, Think-ologist

NATASHA, Think-ologist — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 11:48:08 +0000

Great tips and info
Wellness & Blessings to you
Your Wellness Informant

By: Angel Cuala

Angel Cuala — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 07:42:10 +0000

There are always three angles in an equilateral triangle, but all of them are equal. I think the reasons why Darren decided to make this post are:

1.0 Tell his readers his achievement on his forum to inspire others.
2.0 Give useful tips as he usually does and…
3.0 Promote his forum (I do not see anything wrong with that)

After all, joining any kind of forum is a win-win situation, isn’t it?

Good work, Darren.

By: Robin Majumdar

Robin Majumdar — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 05:03:59 +0000

Interesting, but how much of that 400 / 800 number jump in readership will actually be sustainable in terms of traffic ? I think that is the true acid test. Get ‘em here: done. Remind here to get here: done. Keep ‘em here: another story.

You’ve obviously mastered all three of those aspects, but I think the latter issue (exploring why they didn’t bother validating their registration / memberships) may be of greater long term value.

Robin

By: Dan Mihaliak

Dan Mihaliak — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 18:55:29 +0000

Thanks for the ideas if I could bring my membership numbers up by 400 that would be a 200% jump.

By: Vanessa

Vanessa — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 16:09:02 +0000

Sorry, made a typo in my comment. By 2007 the website 43 Things had 1000,000 registered users. Thanks for the information in the post and the comments are always like icing on the cake.

By: Vanessa

Vanessa — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 16:05:30 +0000

Without experimenting where are you headed? Some percentage of the expertise you have is from experimenting. It becomes knowledge and information to share with others who need it.

A good example that “reminding” people works, is the site 43 Things. Their whole mission is based on reminding people of goals they’ve set for themselves. I know it works because I answered their reminder after being inactive for a long time.

As of April 2007 they had 100,000 registered users. Not bad for 2 years of work.

By: Wakish

Wakish — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 15:47:00 +0000

narcissistic or not, self-whatever or not, this guy (Darren) is doing the right thing, i.e to promote his site’s traffic, and ‘earn’ from it. That’s it. He does give some insightful infos, but to what extent and how much you understand, is all upto each reader to judge.

- Wakish –
(http://wakish.info)

By: Mickey

Mickey — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:15:53 +0000

Great tips! I had over 17,000 people that still hadn’t confirmed their e-mail, so that should help quite a lot.

I’m still working on how best to tackle #2, but I’ll hit it shortly.

Thanks!

By: CoolProducts

CoolProducts — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 21:14:14 +0000

You took some simple and easy steps to increase your membership quite a bit for your level. Good job.

By: LaShanda Henry

LaShanda Henry — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 20:22:00 +0000

Such goodies you give, I love it! I am about to try this out on the members of my social network – http://sistapreneurs.ning.com.

By: goodfather

goodfather — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 20:04:46 +0000

Awesome, thanks for this post! I maintain a newsletter, and I never thought to email my unconfirmed subscribers. :D

By: Tejvan Pettinger

Tejvan Pettinger — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:44:40 +0000

I’m going to write to my unconfirmed subscribers right now. The thing is people appreciate reminders and the ability to share.

Of course, this is not something you do everyweek.

By: Amrit Hallan

Amrit Hallan — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:13:58 +0000

I don’t think Darren’s post is narcissistic; he experimented and then he shared his experience. I think to truly utilize this suggestion we need to see beyond the numbers. We all want to increase traffic to our websites and blogs, we all want to increase our RSS subscribers and newsletter members, and how do we know how much we are succeeding? By looking at the numbers. Setting a target and then trying to achieve it is the best way of doing things.

Though I would agree that not everybody can apply Darren’s advice because he already has the numbers in his favor. I mean how many people have thousands of subscribers to send e-mail reminders to? What I find useful in this post is the suggestion that sometimes people need to be reminded. It often happens that a client sends me a query, I send a reply, and things stop there. Then after a few days I send a follow-up e-mail, you can call it a reminder, and 70% of the time the client is glad that I wrote and I get the project.

By: The Collegiate Gourmet

The Collegiate Gourmet — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:08:21 +0000

I have conflicting views about this, as it seems to me you are asking people to do something for nothing. In other words, you will benefit by getting more business but other than the actual use of your forum and DPS site, where’s the quid pro quo. On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt to ask. Not sure how I feel about this method.

By: Doktor House

Doktor House — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:03:31 +0000

Uhhh. 400 members per day is incredible for my. I have to word harder.