When I was a kid I loved it, I remember I used to have one of those plastic He-Man swords that would make noise, I can’t remember if you had to press buttons or swing it but the sound effects were horrid. I used to hold it over my head and scream “I HAVE THE POWER” just like my idol at the time He-Man. All you children of the 80’s know what I’m talking about and how crazy we used to be for He-Man, Ninja Turtles, Transformers and the rest. Heres a pic of that sword, for some reason I remember mine being different

The live action movie

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093507/

came out in 1987, I remember I saw it either on T.V. or video cassete, I can’t really remember which but I do remember I absolutely loved the movie. Now at 25 years old I realize the movie borrowed heavily from star wars, had horrible acting and was just way too cheesy all around. You know what though I still enjoyed watching it. I laughed when I saw Dolph Lundgen grab the power sword and scream “I HAVE THE POWER” just like the cartoon. A young Courteney Cox looked just plain hot, what happened to her? lol

After watching the movie I decided to google it for some reason. After reading around a bit I find out they are planning to make a new He-Man Masters of the Universe movie slated for 2010. Honestly I couldnt believe what I was reading. After all these years theres still people out there that wanna see He-Man and Skeletor duke it out one more time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_the_Universe_(film)

“2009 film

There is a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe movie currently in production, produced by Joel SilverJustin Marks. The film will reportedly employ visual effects to a large degree, as was done with 300.^[3]“

I guess you can blame the success of the recent Transformers movie for this one. I personally am friggin ecstatic about this. I am hoping this movie is everything the 80’s version wasnt. My biggest gripe about the previous version was that it didnt feel enough like the cartoon. Where the heck was Battle Cat? Why didnt He-Man fight more? Why was Skeletors costume black? Why didnt they show snake mountain?

I have yet to check out the 2002 version of the cartoon, I heard the animation was good so I might check it out while I’m waiting for the new movie. Hopefully we will see a resurgence of the 80’s He-Man phenomenae.

I don’t know why I decided to try Linux. I recently put a new hard drive in my computer and for some reason the idea dawned upon me to put Linux on the old hard drive. Can’t really explain why, the only experience I have had with Linux is interacting with it remotely since so many webservers run it. Its far more stable than windows and more secure to an extent. Oh yeah and its free, I guess thats why servers always seem to run Linux or FreeBSD.

It must have been my inner nerd… eh.. or my outer nerd which was craving something adventerous, something that isnt Windows. I have heard alot about Microsoft being a “monopoly” and something about that has always made me think of it as some sort of huge greedy corporation. I certainly didnt want to give up Windows xp entirely I knew I would still need it to do alot of things like play games for instance. Right now I am very addicted to a game called Company of Heroes and its consuming alot of hours of my life.

I heard long ago that you can dual boot both Windows XP and Linux so thats why it dawned on me to try Linux when I got the new hard drive. I guess you don’t even need two hard drives to dual boot anyway, you can just create an extra partition. I won’t get too into that though mostly because I still have a rough understanding of it.

Something about Linux has always had this slick trendiness about it. The idea of being free from a monopolistic company that every year gains more control over your computer. Maybe this is an exageration but I’m just trying to explain the Linux frame of mind. Linux is whats called Open-Source meaning you can do anything you want with it.

Now when getting started with Linux first you have to find a place to download it and before you can download it I found out I would have to pick a distribution. Theres tons of them

Redhat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian..the list goes on and on, all of them would probably take up this whole page, all of them are good for something different. Some of them are smaller so you can fit them on older computers, some are better for servers and some are better for a desktop pc’s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution

While reading around Linux forums and blogs I found out that Ubuntu is great for begginers so I decided thats the one I would go with. I went to the Ubuntu website to download it and after an hour waiting for it to download I burnt it onto a cd and tried to install. I downloaded it from the official Ubuntu website by the way

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

I found some guides scattered around the net and putting Ubuntu on my second hard drive was pretty straight forward and even self explanatory.

Well something wasnt working right at first, frusterated as I was I knew there had to be an answer somewhere as to why my new Ubuntu OS wasnt loading up.

Heres what I did, I typed the error I was getting into Google, the results showed me several Linux forums where people had the exact same problem and thats where I found my fix. I would find out later thats part of the beauty of Linux, the community. The community where people not only help eachother develope Linux software but also help noobs like me get it started in the first place.

So I see Ubuntu finally start up and how do I feel?

Pretty damn amazed with myself for getting it to work and pretty damn amazed how pretty the desktop looked. I would go on to play with it for the next 6 hours, installing software, experimenting with command line and just learning what it feels like to be free from Windows for the first time in my life. You know what! Linux is damn FUN!

I am amazed first of all how customizable it is, you can literally make it look any way you want. Using a apt get command to download and install software is not only very trippy feeling but so much smoother and easier. Windows always seems to have 50 billion programs running in the background which eat up memory and slow everything way down, so many of them seem to install without me even noticing.

It came with Firefox and it was a breeze transfering my old bookmarks from windows over with Febe

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2109

Linux isnt perfect, chances are your gonna have to do alot more troubleshooting to get things working especially if your not an experienced Linux user. This varies from distribution to distribution, Ubuntu seems to have a great community surrounding it. I signed up here just recently

http://ubuntuforums.org/

Like I said I will still keep Windows XP so I can play games and do Windows exclusive stuff. The fact that Ubuntu sets you up with dual boot when you install it shows you that you can have the best of both worlds but in fact the developers must want you to.

You don’t have to use Ubuntu though, use whatever version of Linux you want. Just try it, try it for fun, try it to gain an inch of freedom back in your life, try it so you can experience all the free software out there, try just to try it. I’m still getting used to using Ubuntu. In the future I want to try installing some other distributions on some old pc’s I have around the house. Its a free up to date OS that I can install on old computers and it will run smoothly. Seems almost too good to be true in some ways. After a while I’ll do a follow up to this blog entry if I remember.

What am I talking about? I am talking about the stationary exercise bike!

Yes for as little as $100 you can get a great cardio workout while surfing your computer for porn, watching the latest episode of Lost or playing Xbox 360. The advantage that a stationary bike has over a treadmill is that you arent being forced into motion, you are going as fast or as slow as you want and can stop without hitting any controls. Its a much more easy going experience trust me.

With both a treadmill and stationary bike you arent forced to run outside and grind your knees and feet to dust on hard rocks and concrete everyday. Lets face it we arent in out teens anymore and we just don’t heal as fast. Not to mention the fact that half the time we are running outside we are getting chased down by dogs or almost getting hit by cars. The treadmill is better because your running on a flat smooth surface but you still do a significant amount of damage to your knees over time when you run on it. After years of construction work my knees just arent capable of it anymore.

Why leave the house at all? Why have to change our clothes and have to shower when we get back? Right now my stationary bike is right next to me and I could easily hop on it, go for about 10 minutes then hop off and finish my blog post. A stationary bike is a computer nerd godsend!

Why did all the empahasis get taken off of good ole cardio and get put on pilates, low card diets, weight loss pills and all kinds of rediculous machines being sold via infomercial? Was our answer in front of us all this time in the form of the stationary bike? How many of us have actually given it a try? Just give it a shot! Do 40 minutes every other day while you watch TV or read wikipedia. If it doesent work well you can leave me a nasty blog comment. I am absolutely sure this will help you though unless you arent willing to put in the effort.

Since I got my exercise bike the fat has been melting off me. Like I said before my joints don’t get so worn down and its 500% easier to motivate myself to hop on the exercise bike since its right next to my computer where I write my blogs. The treadmill is fine if you are into that but I feel its way harder on my knees and I’m also kinda scared my cat is gonna get caught up in it for some reason.

So in conclusion I’m just gonna ask everyone to stop the insanity and bring the stationary bike back. Its the only thing besides running outside that has helped me get in shape. Just think about it, you can get a great cardio workout without having to leave your house and facing the sometimes scary and dangerous outside world and putting strain on your feet and joints.

http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com

Theres pictures of things that look like water, trees, mechanical looking objects, things that look like statues and even what seems to be an alien skull

skull pic

Sure we could say that these are all misshapen rocks but I will let you browse through that site and judge for yourself. To me this is enough evidence that at some point there was or still is life on Mars and if there was life in our own solar system then that means that the chances of there being more life in our galaxy rise exponentially. Perhaps Mars was our original birthplace. If theres bacteria or spores that can survive in space then perhaps life gets seeded every so often when an opportunity arises.

4.Millions of eye witness stories - Yeah sure maybe 99% of them are either sightings of venus or outright lies but if even 1% of people who supposebly saw UFO’s are telling the truth that means that there is something in our skies. Alot of these people have passed lie detector tests. Many of them were found with strange objects underneath their skin or were reported missing for several days.

Have a look at The National UFO Reporting Center Online Database

You will see that theres lots of new UFO sightings everyday. These people must be bored to keep up this huge charade right? yeah…

3.Astronaut Gordon Cooper coming forward about his UFO experience -

Just ask yourself why would this man lie. Is he lying and everyone else is lying also?

2.NASA footage - Yeah sure anyone can edit a video with the latest computer 3D video editing software but how the heck can anyone explain the UFO’s which have been caught by NASA? Heres the STS-75 incident for example

Sure I have heard the usual hard to buy explanations such as space dust but I don’t think any logical person in their right mind would think that Space dust could be right up to the camera and move behind the tether.

Heres a narrative by David Sereda

This is just one example of the millions of video tapes and pictures out there, here is a nice compilation if you still arent convinced

1.The universe is a huge place - as far as we can tell space just keeps going on forever. the chances of there being millions or even billions of earth like planets out there are very high. Most scientists will tell you that life most likely does exist out there so ask yourself are you smarter than most scientists?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_life

Please try to argue with these facts I have presented.

I cannot say that these UFO’s for sure represent life from another planet, perhaps they are from another demension or even from the future. One thing I do know is that something is going on.

We build links because they help our search engine rankings and depending on where they are will also give us traffic. Why am I writing about such a overdone topic? Well because link building is a huge pain in the butt. Its some of the most repetitous work you will ever do. Even flipping burgers is more exciting than cutting and pasting your sites descriptions over and over into various directory fields. Wait..did I just say directory fields? I take that back because I am not touching directories anymore, why is this? Because recently Google has stated that it will be penalizing sites that sell links.

It seems to me that most people get into the directory game to make money right? Well even the best directories get horrible traffic so we can only assume that even a free directory will soon be abondoned when the owner realizes that he will never be able to sell links and make money off of it. This is why yesterday I abondoned my one directory in an effort to concentrate on the sites that are truly important to me.

When I started my directory it was before Googles announcement. At Digitalpoint forums it looked to me like a directory was a must have for any webmaster. At that time google toolbar pagerank was as good as gold. If you had a high pr directory you could expect a couple submissions everyday. At 5 bucks per entry you could easily make $150 by just having your directory listed in your signature. Being the wide eyed optimistic youth I was I quickly jumped aboard.

Imagine my suprise when I woke up one morning and I seen my PR go from 5 to 0 overnight. I noticed my submissions had slowed down to a crawl after Googles announcement but I felt it would be unethical to sell it even though deep down I knew my directory would soon be next to worthless.

Keep in mind that I don’t mean to be totally over the top with my pessimistic attitude towards this whole situation. If your a directory owner I wouldnt totally give up hope yet, check out this article at avivadirectory about how to get your Google pagerank back

http://www.avivadirectory.com/downloadblog/?p=338

As for me I’m done with directories altogether, I’m done running them and I don’t want any links from them I would rather concentrate on

forum sigs - at least they bring in a little traffic here and there

blog comments - don’t forget to comment on this blog : )

link exchanges - useless for pr but they do bring great traffic in alot of cases

Don’t forget to also pay lots of attention to your on page SEO and who you choose to link to. Marketing your site might seem like its getting harder now without the ability to buy links but remember when one door shuts another opens.

First your gonna have to ask yourself what a forum is. If you were to ask me this is what I would tell you.

What is a forum?

Here are my answers.

1.Its an information database - This means that if your forum is about artwork then chances are theres going to be tons and tons of information and peoples experiences related to artwork. People will use the search function on your forum to search through thousands of posts/threads to get what they are looking for. People will also find your forum when they look up specific information with Google and other search engines.

2.Its a community - No this doesent mean that everyone at a forum is a loser looking for friends. It simply means that you are giving people a place where they can discuss whatever your forums about with likeminded people. After a while your forum will get its own feel to it. I have noticed most communities start giving nicknames to their members as a whole, for example at sherdog.net members are reffered to as sherdoggers or at digitalpoint.com they are usually called DP’ers. This is what you want, you want a sense of community and kinship. People who feel this way will be quick to invite friends.

Remember human beings are social creatures, like Joe Rogan said in prison they punish inmates by taking them away from all the killers, rapists and thieves and put them in solitary confinement. People need other people to be happy, thats a scientific fact. You might actually save lives by giving people a place where they can interact and be creative.

Now that we know what a forum is how can we use this information to get more members? Well both of these things I listed represent value. A forum is an information database right? WELL THEN GET SOME INFORMATION UP THERE!

1.Is your forum about fish? Then post some great fish articles! Write your own or if your gonna use other peoples make sure the first thing you post is the source of the article as in the url, don’t ever take from people with out giving them a link, a link is gold to webmasters and is the only reason why they would allow you to post their content on your forum.

WHEN YOU MAKE GOOD THREADS THIS WILL NOT ONLY GIVE PEOPLE SOMETHING TO READ BUT WILL GIVE SEARCH ENGINE SPIDERS CONTENT TO SLURP UP AND DISPLAY IN THEIR SEARCH RESULTS.

Try making a Frequently Asked Questions(F.A.Q.) about your topic and stickying or pinning the thread. This can be an awesome resource your can provide first time visitors right off the bat.

Post every youtube video related to your topic you can find, make your own youtube videos then put a link to your forum in the vid and in the video description. Once you get some members you can have contests where members will make videos, make sure part of the rules are they have to include your url in the videos. Youtube can be a great marketing tool for any website, don’t forget that.

Whenever you write up a nice post/article/FAQ or if you make a vid or whatever else you do to add content you can use social bookmarking like Digg.com or stumbleupon.com to share it with the world. Don’t do this with other peoples content obviously only your own. You can Digg or Stumble good quality threads just like a blog post, just make sure theres lots of good content in whatever your sharing. Make sure you don’t overdo it or you will get banned from Digg like what happened to me. I Dug too many crappy short threads with short first posts.

Remember, no content=no visitors

You can even set up an rss feed to make posts in a certain part of the forum everytime it updates. You may even want to use a bunch of rss feeds to not only post in a certain forum but to show up on your main portal page using products like vbadvanced(for vbulletin). This can make your mainpage into a news resource.
The great thing about having a blog or any other non forum site is that the traffic you already have will filter into your forum and become members. Instead of using a portal script like vbulletin you might even want to use a blog as your mainpage. For example if I was to add a forum to this site I would have the url be

howtoflow.com/forum

Ok we established the importance of content, now remember every forum member you get is someone who will possibly add lots and lots of content to your forum, a great reason to be nice to everyone who visits. Actually another thing you should remember is never under any circumstances be an asshole to anyone, you will just drive people away with all the negativety. I had to learn this the hard way and I still have trouble keeping my mouth shut alot of the time. Just remember that theres never any pride on the line over the internet, don’t let anyone piss your off or have any sort of control over your emotions.

This sorta leads into my next major recommendation to anyone starting a brand new forum or anyone who’s having trouble getting members.

2. Be a bunch of people!

People want to join a forum with activity, noone wants to join a dead community and if they do join they most likely will not come back.

The thing is though if you sign up yourself under alot of different names and post this content under different names it will make your forum look 100% more active for ever username you sign up as. I know this sounds stupid but ask yourself what will look better. A forum with just one member or a forum with 5 members who post new content regularly? Create some unique characters or “gimmicks” as forumers refer to them as and try to make them as funny/entertaining as possible. If your gonna fight with someone online fight with yourself lol. This is your chance to be creative and show off some writing skills.

3.Get posters by any means necessary.

This means beg people to sign up, beg them to stay. Get a reputation at another forum and put a link in your sig(do not do this if the forum owner isnt ok with it, its unethical, usually they don’t care though). Get your friends from real life to come and make some posts. Offer free downloads to anyone who signs up. Your gonna have to give people a reason to come back, sometimes all you need is an active community to get people to come back but when you are first starting you might want to think of ways you can provide people with something they WANT like unique content or downloads or even just entertainment. Put together some contests, send emails to non active members telling them to comeback, do what you gotta do and use your head. If it applies to your nich you might even want to setup a personals section where people can find mates who are into the same stuff they are.

You may want to make a Myspace or Face book page specifically for your forum. You can search for people who you might think will be interested in your topic and invite them as friends. Be carefull with that though you don’t want Tom to think your spamming people, I heard hes a badass.

4.Search Engine Optimization(SEO).

Yes I know this is a scary and confusing word for alot of people but without it you might as well forget everything I already told you and give up on starting your own forum altogether(never give up). First you need to learn the basics of SEO such as

Title Tage

Meta Tags

Keywords in your domain

Backlinks

Trust

Domain Age

Anyways you get the idea, I’m gonna cover more forum specific SEO stuff so please learn about this stuff first using google. Search for stuff like “Basic website SEO”, “Search Engine Optimization Techniques”,”How To Rank High With Search Engines”

Use the links I post at the bottom of this article, The forums I will be mentioning are places where I have learned more about SEO(search engine optimization) than anywhere else.

Anyways for those “experts” out there I will move onto the more forum specific stuff.

-Make your pages as unique as possible, Remember every thread is also a page that search engines see. Get rid of useless junk in your forum titles such as “powered by vbulletin” anything else besides the thread title will just make those threads less “relevent” to search engines. What this means is if someone searches for “how to make cheese” then they will be more likely to see your page high up on the search engine results page if your thread is titled

“how to make cheese” than if its “how to make cheese - powered by vbulletin”

Remember though to keep the copyright information in your footer, you cannot remove that stuff.

-Make sure you have a mainpage that updates with new content regularly, I did touch on this earlier. You can use Vbadvaned and other portal software to display the newest forum threads on your front page. Search engines will like this because to them a main page that constantly is updated means a site that is more likey to be of higher quality, this will gain you “trust” with search engines, Google specifically is real big on trust. Remember a blog can also be a great main/portal page, be sure to make new blog posts regularly. Your main page will also be your highest PR page so more content equals more possible combinations of keywords that will cause your main page to pop up on search engines. Make sure if you have threads feeding to the mainpage that they are from an active subforum that contains threads/posts related to your nich.

- Internal Linking.

If you can, make sure all of your pages not only link back to your homepage but also link to ever forum area. Look at the popular forum

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/

See at the top left of the navbar theres and extra forum jump menu. By having this they make sure every page/thread is gonna link to all the individual subforums. The stock forum jump menu at the bottom right hand side does not actually show the urls if you were to look at the source code. I am not sure about the specifics of this but I do know Digitalpoint is the biggest forum I have ever seen.

By doing this we make sure that “link juice” passes to each of these main forums from every page. To understand this your going to have to learn about how links and link juice effect your search engine rankings.

Make sure any links that point to your main page are uniform meaning that you dont want half of them saying www.forums.com and the other half saying forums.com without the www. This will split up your link juice. Actually you should be only using one or the other anyway. Get non www. to point to www or vice versa use DNS or a htacess redirect.

I’m not gonna go too much more into SEO since theres more than I could possibly cover with this one article so from here on out your gonna have to spend your time not only learning about it but keeping on top of it and other marketing techniques. Here are my favorite places to learn about SEO/marketing for forums and in general.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ - Huge webmaster/SEO community that with a forum specific area here

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=64

http://www.v7n.com/forums/ - A smaller community than Digitalpoint but imo you get more quality information and less new people asking the same questions over and over. The owner John is a really nice guy who is always quick to offer advice.

http://www.bzimage.org/ - A great new forum related to SEO and marketing. Even though its still a new community you will still find tons of great info to help you market and SEO your forum.

http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/forum/ - This is specifically for Vbulletin users but alot of the tricks and tips can be applied to other forum scripts too. This is hands down the best place to learn SEO for forums imo. Check out the Vbulletin SEO section here

http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=17

^^^remember to look at the things these sites do with their forums in fact study every forum you come across and be sure to ask yourself key questions such as “how did this forum get users?” or “why would anyone keep coming back here?”

conclusion:

Now are these tips going to gaurantee success with your forum? Of course not, only a ton of determination, alot of smarts and a little luck will gaurantee success. Be nice to people, generate good karma and remember to always be thinking of new ways to get that new member.

At some point probably after your first 2 or 3 thousand members you should reach a “critical mass” point and the community itself will start attracting new members. Once you are there you should at least be satisfied that you started a community but if you want to make sure people don’t move onto greener pasture and if you really want to start earning some $$$ your gonna have to keep working hard forever. Just remember to take a World of Warcraft or Call of Duty 4 break every so many hours to refresh yourself