Sunday 25 March 2007

Now you can opt-in!

It's taken longer than I expected - and this was supoosed to be ready last Sunday when the site went live - but today saw the implementation of the sacred opt-in form on my homepage! I've been preaching this in my eighth article about the several ways in which your business can fail. One of them is failure to build a list.

Oh well, ho hum, stammer, mumble... Not good enough, is it?

That glaring omission has at last been put right and I now have the required opt-in box especially for the purpose. Well, now I can sleep at night.

Another change to the site has been the big move of the member's forum from the freehosting server over to my own at HostGator. The reasons for this are few but important.

1. My own server guarantees better uptime.

2. By occupying a page on the website, site traffic will increase.

3. Content will continuously be added and changed. Search engines like that!

4. More people will get to know about my site through word of mouth (or post!)

All in all a very good move, methinks! Now at the moment, there are, of course no members on the forum as it hasn't been advertised yet. That is about to change. My next awsome task is to visit every forum and message board I know and welcome all comers to my forum.

They'll come.

In dribs and drabs at first, granted, but come they will. Why? Because I have created a forum thread purely for blatant ads to be posted - the only proviso being you have to register first. Plenty of marketers will do that purely because it is another place to advertise for free and we all do it. But some will stop and post meaningful topics too and the serious side of the forum will gradually grow.

As traffic to the forum grows, content will increase and change more rapidly, the search engines will like it even more and the site's rating will also improve. Good theory, no?

So that's about all for today's post. Lots of exciting things happening and more looming on the horizon for The Honest Way.

Thanks for looking in, see you again soon!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way
http://www.thehonestway.com

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