Very nice approach not sure if I would have thought about it this way!

But what amount of members did you hold out to before you made this reduction and how hard was it to recruit the initial ones seeing you had not many to begin with?

Also did you at any time try and offer any lifetime memberships, trial memberships, or even free ones? And did you allow visitors to see who was already signed up or did you keep that from them until they registered. How many members do you currently have on your site now and how well does it perform?

Thank you for your feedback!!

Zorro……………………………………

One thing I do understand very well is search strategy and so I did pick up loud and clear what you are talking about. I also have spent some time reading roadmap plans for 6.1 and it appears that Dolpin is making leaps and bounds to make some of these things much easier in the next release.

One of the things I have been struggling with is wondering when is the right time to begin to charge so the site can become profitable? And do you continue to offer a free membership and then just have upgrade levels. How do you determine the correct time to charge a fee for members seems like a challenge in itself? Is there a certain amount of free members one should have first or should a community offer a low cost one-time lifetime membership to early adopters.

I have some other unrelated sites that are more information based and are completely free to use but I make money from various referral services I provide. I am aware of Google Adsense and other forms of making profits online bt trying to do something a little diffrent. I personally am hoping to have a fee site.

When you change the focus from ” Local meet up ” and center it on ” building a community of friends” then everyone wins, members return and remain loyal… just because of thier own interest have been met and they lose the focus on “local” attention.

Build a community focused on a common interest. try to come up with an original idea… something no one else has. Of course we all use Boonex, but we do not have to be “cookie cutter” sites. Each site can have a totally different focus and as Andrey said “Soul”

regards
Simion

From our experiences - for a site to take off and gain a large membership base it always takes time, no matter what you do. The catch is that people do local searches - and once they can’t find anybody from their area - they run. BUT, there IS a way around…

For us - the best way to build a community was engaging people to join a discussion of mutual interest. In short - you pick a niche, set a topic and do your best to get the conversation going - this will make people come back. They don’t care about bells and whistles too much anymore - they need and want to be heard, they want an extra gratification for what they “are/know/give”. IMO The most powerful tool to keep a member ever in vented is … comments :) yep, give them a chance to write, then comment - and you’re set. Let them upload a photo - and they will come to see opinions. Later on - they will become dependent on these comments and will call/invite friends.

Money don’t help - you wouldn’t pay much for friends, and most people don’t sell friends easily. Ah.. and we generally don’t have hundreds of real friends anyway.

So, I believe there are just a few ingredients that help a community site to take off, and they are (in order of importance):

1. Personal Attention (be prepared to write a lot)

2. Topic/Niche (they will write about what they care, they will join for what they need, they will look for who they are interested in)

3. Simplicity (don’t create levels, multi-levels and systems - you should be able to describe your site in 5 words)

4. Soul (no advice here, totally up to you)

5. Software (advice - BoonEx)

My 2 cents.