Hi everyone, new here

**oddmusic** · 11-06-2006, 08:02 PM

Hi,

I'm John, I run a website about odd, unusual and experimental musical instruments and music. New to vBulletin, but working to get online in a few days, installing a few mods, skins, and hacks, and found this place while looking for optimization tips. Like I really need them now, with only myself as a member, heh heh, but why not start off right, easier that way. The website grew out of an old ListServ started in 1996, and went online in 1999. The old group still exists as a Yahoo group, and the long time members still REALLY like it that way (email discussion), so I'm leaving it as it is, and starting a new forum using vBulletin. I'm sure many folks will migrate over once they see the possibilities vBulletin offers.... there's about 1000 members, but you can never really tell who's using it when it's a yahoo group. Anyway, I guess that's enough babbling for an intro post... If anyone remembers what a dialup BBS is, I ran a Wildcat! BBS a long long time ago, back when there were these things called 300/1200 baud modems :lmao: before there was such a thing as a Web Browser.

**Brandon Sheley** · 11-06-2006, 08:28 PM

Hello John,
Welcome to vBulletinSetup

I'm glad you where able to find us when you did. I believe that if you start optimizing when you first start up, you're chances of success will increase tremendously

As I said in the pm, I don't have much time to chat even on my own site

right now..
We have some very friendly members here who are gaining knowledge in optimizing their vBullein. Hopefully between them and myself, we'll get you set up to take advantage of the great script.

-Bs

**oddmusic** · 11-07-2006, 01:45 PM

Thanks for the warm welcome, already learning a lot, and just re-reading this intro post and seeing how you've integrated Adsense so nicely, and how it did its magic targeting to the content I posted. While 99% of the ads on my site look like what just showed up in this thread (music related), since my site is pretty specific, it'll be nice to integrate that into a discussion forum, as topics will generally center around a certain theme, but as they vary, so will the ads, which is great, as it'll open up a whole new avenue.

Oh, and one last thing and I'll stop blabbing about my website... if you've got good content.... web, discussion board, etc, which gives you the eye balls, especially if it's something your visitors will post in other places, you can definitely make some decent money AND still be a resource to your visitors. The only reason I moved my site from my servers at work was because we were changing some policies about hosting personal sites. I thought I was so cool not having to pay for hosting all these years... so I moved it, decided to give targeted ads a try, just to see if I could maybe pay for some of the bandwidth/hosting charges. Really, it was just for fun actually, since I thought not much would become of it, a few cents here, a few cents there. But once I got the hang of it, and set up, I was amazed to find out that my little 130 page static site pays for a month of hosting in just a few hours...so after the 1st day of the month, the rest is profit. I anticipate that bringing vBulletin into the picture will have similar results, and sites like this one (vbulletinsetup.com) are definitely a big help and resource.

**Brandon Sheley** · 11-07-2006, 03:51 PM

Might I suggest you check the link in my sig about VBSEO.. It's what I use here and suggest to all our clients.

btw, adsense stats, it takes me just about the whole month to hit my bill.

**oddmusic** · 11-07-2006, 05:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brandon

Might I suggest you check the link in my sig about VBSEO.. It's what I use here and suggest to all our clients.

Cool, I was going to ask what you were using, I'll check it out for sure.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brandon

btw, adsense stats, it takes me just about the whole month to hit my bill.

I was very surprised, but the site's been around for 7 years in various forms, and it's got that "hey, look at this funky thing" going for it, so people pass links around a lot it seems. Your place still has that "new car" scent, but looks to be growing at a very rapid pace, so you'll get there pretty quick I believe, as it becomes known more and more as a great resource.:1yes:

**Brandon Sheley** · 11-07-2006, 05:15 PM

7 years old.. Nice * mouth waters

*

Your PR is so nice that you could sell 10 links in the footer of the front page for one month @ at least 15$ each easy

btw, let me know if you want to sell a link

**oddmusic** · 11-07-2006, 07:54 PM

Ya know.... you'd think that working for one of the top 10 largest media companies in the country that I'd know that:1eek: ... but I work in the network security technical side of things, and my site was just for fun and pretty much went ignored by me for a long while until BoingBoing did a blurb in August, and hits went through the roof for a few weeks, so I decided to finally give it a face lift after 5 years, not great, but more "accessible" looking, and still playing with it. If I can find the time (which I have a bit of an incentive to do now) I could easily double the amount of content I have, since I get requests to put stuff online all the time but don't update often... guess that should change. I've only had ads on there for 5 weeks now... guess that's probably why I don't work in marketing....hmmmm where's the "duh" smiley :wink: only took me about 20 minutes to figure out what you meant when you said "your PR is nice"... and I thought, oh yeah, Google mentions something about this "Page Rank" thing, oh, that's what he's talking about

.... anyway, looks like we have a few things to chat about on or offline :1yes:
OK, enough of me hogging up the Intro forum, probably should be working on getting my new forum publicly online anyway... kind of boring in there now with just me and my imaginary test-user friends.

**jw00dy** · 11-07-2006, 09:52 PM

Welcome aboard. I checked out your site and it is very interesting. Even if one has no interest in music or instruments, that site could still consume quite a bit of my time just checking out the different instruments on there.

Anyway, welcome aboard.