I was checking out the Google Webmaster Central Blog and discovered Google Friend Connent. It is in the early stages of development, but looks like a great way to spice up a static, HTML site and generate activity on your site. Google states that Google Friend Connect will generate traffic to your site by getting visitors to link their social network accounts to your site. Google provide a great Google Friend Connect Video Tutorial. Enjoy!

Other posts that you might find interesting:

• Focus Your Efforts on Low Bounce-rate Traffic
• Google Adsense For Search Changes
• Google Analytics Basics

I log into my Google Analytics account several times a week and log into my server to review my stats just as frequently. I look at several things to help me focus my attention on getting high quality traffic. To determine this I look at how many visitors the sources send me, the percentage of new visitors, the page views and the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that visit your site then immediately leave. Anything with a bounce rate of 50% or higher should be a source you should not waste time on. Focus your effort on Google and other sources that have a low bounce rate and a high percentage of new visitors that stay on your site.

I will again use my largest site Sports Card Forum as the example since it gets so much traffic. For the past 30 days the site got 194,000+ visits and provides a long list of traffic sources. Here are a list of sites that I get a lot of traffic from, but also have very high bounce rates.

1. Stumble Upon - This should not seem as a surprise. Stumble Upon is my #21 traffic source and got me 473 visitors. Almost everyone that visited my site was new (99%). That would be great if the bounce rate wasn’t at 87%! That means that nearly 9 out of 10 visitors from Stumble Upon left right away. The only way that can be good is if they clicked on a CPC ad like Google AdSense!
2. Google Images - I’ve discussed this in the past. When people are searching for images and find your site the bounce rate will be very high. Visitors will either take the image or hotlink to it. In the case of Sports Card Forum the bounce rate was 55%.
3. Link Exchanges with irrelevant sites - This should be a no brainer. You will not get a lot of quality traffic if your site is linked on sites that have nothing to do with your content. Focus your effort on similar interest sites.

These three examples should give you an idea of sources that may give you a lot of traffic, but the traffic quality is low. You want sources that send you a lot of new visitors, have a low bounce rate and the members stay on your site for a long time. Let’s look at some of the better ones.

1. Direct Traffic - Obviously if people are typing in your domain name directly or bookmarking your site these are visitors you want. Get your visitors to subscribe to your site. Provide great, original content and users will come back for more! In the case of Sports Card Forum direct traffic accounted for most of the traffic or 100,000+ visits with a bounce rate of 13%. The average visitor stayed on the site for 16 minutes and accounted for an average of 19 page views!
2. Google - If you are not optimizing your site for Google then you are not optimizing your site. Google accounted for 41,000+ visits with a moderate bounce rate around 30%. This means that 2 to 1 visitors are finding Sports Card Forum via Google and spending some quality time on the site. The average visitor stayed on the site for 12 minutes.
3. E-mail - If your users/visitors have subscribed to your site’s content you will get a lot of traffic with a low bounce rate. Obviously, these visitors were interested enough to subscribe. The average bounce rate was around 7% and as low as 1%. This is the traffic you are after and where you should focus much of your effort! If you don’t have a way for users to subscribe, then spend some time adding it.
4. Digg.com - If you write content you should be submitting it to Digg. It does have a higher bounce rate than most, but at a 39% bounce rate it is twice as good as Stumble Upon. While Stumble Upon got me more traffic, more users stayed on my site when they came from Digg.com. 43% of my visitors were new and they stayed on my site for 40 minutes accounting for 38 page views per visit! That is nearly three times the rate of my direct visitors. Digg your content for great traffic and Stumble only if you have time!
5. Partner Websites with the same theme - If you have link exchanges with relevant websites that traffic likely to generate better results compares to sites that have nothing to do with your website. If you run a tech blog don’t waste your time getting your links on non-tech/gadget sites. The bounce rate will be through the roof or the traffic will be marginal.

Spend some qulaity time in your server stats and on Google Analytics! See what sites have the lowest bounce rate, highest percentage of new visitors and the ones that generate the most page views. This is the traffic you want and should focus your energy on!

Other posts that you might find interesting:

• Google Adsense For Search Changes
• Google Analytics Basics
• Google Friend Connect Tutorial

There are several types of websites. The most common types of websites are content sites with no user visitor activity, blogs with some visitor activity and forums where visitors can become full members. While a blog offers your visitors the opportunity to post comments on articles and subscribe to articles/comments, a forum allows your visitors to become fully engaged in your site by building a profile and starting threads/articles. Adding a forum to your blog can really increase activity on your website thus earn you more cash.

I manage several communites using forum software. My largest community (Sports Card Forum) has had 28,000+ registered users and sees on avaerage 3,500 posts daily. The forum gets about 20-30 new members daily and is the largest community dedicated solely to sports cards. In this article I will give you some tips for starting and running an online community. I added a forum to my Zune Blog and it has had some great success.

When to start a forum

You should only add a forum to your website when you are confident in your traffic. I have seen hundreds of new forums start and remain a ghost town, eventually closing down due to low traffic. If your blog is getting a lot of traffic and your visitors are commenting a lot then it may be time to start a forum. If you plan on starting a forum from scratch as a new website then it is important to have a plan on gaining traffic.

Picking a Theme

The most important aspect of running a community is picking a niche that has not been over done. For instance, starting a forum dedicated to NFL football would not be a great idea since there are so many of them. Other the other side of the spectrum, starting a forum dedicated to s specific player may be too specific. They key is to find a niche that has not been overdone already, but is not too obscure.

Forum Software

I highly recommend using some of the existing forum software scripts out there vice paying a coder to build you a forum from scratch. You can buy proven software for a fraction of what a coder will charge you. While there are hundreds of programs I will only cover a few. I’m picking the ones that are scalable, used a lot and have dedicated coders that offer free ad ons. Here are my recommendations:

Premium Forum Software

• vBulletin - the most popular forum software and what I use for all of my forums. You can get an owned license for $160 or a leased license for $85. There is a large, dedicated community of coders that develop ad ons a vBulletin.org.
• Invision - Invision is another great software script, but in my opinion is second-tier to vBulletin. The standard license cost is $149.

Free Forum Software

• PHPBB - PHPBB is by far the most used, free forum software. It is great software for something that is free. Is has a great community of coders that write ad ons for free much like Vbulletin. A great script at no cost!
• Simple Machine Forums (SMF) - Many call this forum software a vBulletin kncok off. It is another great forum software script that is free.

Here is a basic checklist to starting a forum

1. Purchase the script and fill out your account information. Download the script to your computer.
2. If the forum is an addition to your website/blog create a folder titled “forum” or what ever you want to call it. Another example would be “community”. Read the install instructions. Upload the proper files to the folder.
3. Install the script and run through the set up procedures. You will need experience with setting up a database. If your skills around a server and/or database are lacking then pay the extra money to have the devloper install it for you.
4. Once your forum is live log into the administrator area and spend some quality time going through the options.
5. Spend time readin up on the COPPA requirements if you are going to allow kids under tha age of 13 years old as members.
6. Set up your forums. Do NOT create too many forums or your site will look like a ghost town. As your site grows you can ad sub-forums

That’s it! You will know have a forum that can grow into a huge community. Members will have their own accounts and can start or reply to discussion topics. In the future I will write up tips on managing your community. Here are some great communities that I run that should give you an idea of what a community is like.

• Sports Card Forum - large sports card community
• Trader Retreat - exclusive sports card community
• Zune Info Forum - Microsoft Zune community attached to my blog
• Korea Discussion Community - For English speakers living in South Korea

Other posts that you might find interesting:

• Being an Active Forum Member Helps A Lot!