In the mean time stupid spammers have been busy.  I have hundreds of spam posts.  None of them are getting through so you spammer are wasting your time.  Get a life.

Advertising
I am working to consolidate all of my adverting through a single source. I have chosen Openx as my platform. Currently my advertising as has been scattered through direct images, third party served ads, application specific ad scripts, and openx. I am now going to be running everything through Openx under my new parent company called Sacramento Publishing. The ads will run from a single domain sacpub.net. This way none of my stats will get intermixed with serving an ad.

I will still serve up third party ads like adsense, but they will all run through my Openx install. This will allow me greater control of what is displayed and when. I will also have much better tracking of all my ads and websites. I will be able to better see what ads do well and websites are performing better than others.

Forums
I have several sites running forums. I am trying to consolidate and upgrade all of them. I am still evaluating all of the software packages out there. My current direction is all of my sites with free forum software will run MyBB. All sites with paid for software will run vBulletin. None of my vBulletin sites have been upgraded to VB4 yet, but that is not too far in the future. They are currently at 4.02. I may wait until 4.03 if they plan on changing the theme system.

Community Administrator
This site has a lot of growing to do. I am nowhere near happy with the theme. This is a relatively low priority for me right now, but it is something I will be working on in the months to come.

Analytics
I have a few of my sites running Google Analytics, but I need to get all of them running it. It’s a good tool to see where your traffic is coming from, what people do on your site, and what keywords people use to find your site. Currently I monitor all of my traffic through awstats. While awstats works well it is a pain to open each installation to see different stats for different websites. A single stats location will be nice.

Quantcast
I feel the need to be able to show potential advertisers the demographics and stats for my sites before they buy an ad. I am not selling advertising simply to make money. I have a genuine desire to help other businesses especially small business. With Quantcast I can let me advertisers see who they will be advertising to.

Local Community Based Sites
I am hoping to expand my footprint in the Sacramento area. I have several geographic specific sites and I want to ad more. My first step will be to purchase some domain names. I really want to find partners in each geographic area that I expand into. If you are in the Sacramento area and are interested let me know.

In later posts I will discuss all of these things in more detail. For now let me offer this little bit of advice, “Do something everyday”. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Don’t ever forget about your online community or your users will forget about you. Every day you should respond to comment posts or forum posts. Every day you should try to get one more link to your site. Every day you should try to make a blog post or a forum post or write an article.

In reality you probably have a life outside of your online community. You probably take a vacation every once in a while. You may not be able to do something every single day, but you should try if you want a successful online community.

Since I am just starting with this blog I will look around for a free Wordpress theme.  There are tons of them out there.

I really like to stick with as few platforms as possible.  Up to now vbulletin was my forums software of choice.  Vbulletin recently made some changes and I am looking at other platforms.   Some of these changes were a good thing, but not all of them.  I figured this would be my chance to look at these other platforms.

Follow this blog and I will document my findings.

I run several successful communities so I thought I should put down some of the thoughts, tips, suggestions to help other people in their quest to be a Community Administrator.