Sphaggy[dot]Net

I’ve have had atleast 6 attempts to start an online community (forums, CMS, etc2x) and I’m sad to say that almost all of them are epic fail. I can say that I am very well experienced on the what ‘not to do’ in starting an online community. So at the moment I should be very aware of what to do in starting an online community.

First of all is to decide a niche for the community. General and ‘talk about anything’ forums just won’t click. Unless you’re one of the pioneering forums, but still the forums will start to die out anyway, as members of the community will find more interesting forums with their niche of choice and start to post there more and more. Niche’s should be narrowed down and then narrowed down again until you get that topic that you are comfortable with. So gaming can be narrowed down to ps3 gaming, which in turn can be narrowed down to ps3 hardware until you get that niche that is specific yet is not limiting for the users.
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Monetizing your website is really a joy. But what if it gets so large to the point that you have trouble maintaining ad clients. This is what OpenAds is for. I’m using it for nurseako.com, though the learning curve is moderately steep, the rewards that it brings will far make up for it.

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I got interested in selling merchandise on my blog through shopping carts, well only after it gets famous and is at the google and yahoo level. Anyway, I looked for solutions on how to get things done. Self hosted ecommerce software are nice, that is until you get into dilemmas, like programming, security issues etc2x. So the best solution, in my humble opinion is probably the hosted solution or shops that are hosted by other services.

I googled it and wound up on ashopcommerce. One great advantage in using their service is that they host your shop, which means less space and bw consumption on your servers; they maintain your shop, so that means less burden on the administrators part; and they will give you support, so that if you run into problems you will have fallback or a go to solution incase you run into problems you cant solve yourself.

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So after a few revisions, ups and downs to nurseako.com, I have finally stabilized my ideas and possible features.  First of all it will be a community, not just a community about nursing, but a community of nurses. That may sound confusing to some, but totally makes sense to me.

The contents of the site will not be limited to nursing topics. But ofcourse the main topics in the site will be about nursing. So gaming, politics, and anything related to the general interest of the community (which is non existent at the moment), will be its main topics.

The main feature of the nurseako.com will be the forums. Any great articles in the forums will be posted in the main site. This is to ensure good feedback from the community and proper revisions to ensure minimal errors on the article.

The site is nowhere complete at the moment. So the forums will be its main source of articles and guides before I put them on the main site.
So please do visit the site. Hopefully you will find the site enticing and will keep you visiting. We are also looking for volunteer staff that will help me maintain the forums and write articles. Contributors will be given a account on the main site which will allow them to write and post content. It may also be a good way to promote your sites *wink wink*