I managed to nab this gem from Circuit City over the Thanksgiving weekend. Regularly $899 CC had put it on sale for $499, and the reviews on the web were pretty upbeat, all things considered. Alas, I missed it on Friday but one of the stores here in Charlotte happened to find eight of them in a corner of their warehouse Saturday morning and they were listed on the CC website for $499. Trying not to get pulled over by Charlotte’s finest, I zipped to the store and snagged one of two remaining units. While there, we were told the price had been reset to $899 but the store honored the $499 price, we did call first to make sure they had them.Anyway, I finally got around to getting it hooked up and I must say, it’s much more than I expected. I realize that if compared to a new Sony or some other top of the line model the Olevia 232V might seem lacking, but for a bedroom tv, it was a great bargain. In fact, it would go a long way as a primary tv in an apartment or for the new homeowner that would like to get and LCD HDTV but just doesn’t have a couple grand to fork over right now.

[Read more →]

Let me run right out and get a copy. At events around the world today Microsoft launched the next version of their operating system along with Office 2007 and Exchange 2007. While retail customers can’t yet purchase Vista, business customers can purchase through Microsoft’s volume licensing program. At the New York launch event, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had this to say:

It’s an exciting thing to finally be here, that’s all I’ll say about the past.

This is the biggest launch in our company’s history, these are frankly the most significant releases of these two products [Vista and Office] we’ve ever done.

So after countless months of talking and waiting it’s finally here. I’m sure I won’t see it where I work for some time but I might just have to go snag a copy the first of the year to start getting ready. If history is any indication, while better than it’s predecessors Vista will most likely change the tech support landscape and not necessarily for the better.

So you have your forum all setup, now what? This isn’t a field of dreams; simply putting the site on the web doesn’t mean people will come out in droves. In order to survive you need traffic, preferably targeted traffic, or rather visitors that are interested in what your site is about. How do you get this traffic? Here are some of the more popular suggestions.Search Engines: Search engine traffic will probably make up the majority of your traffic. If you want your forum to get noticed then you need to secure good positioning for keywords related to your forums niche. The higher you rank in the search results, the more traffic you will receive. This is no simply task though. Gaining high positions in the search engines can be a frustrating and time consuming task, one that could take months rather than weeks to gain depending on your niche. There are niches out there that are virtually untouched with huge explosive potential, the trick is finding them. Let’s say your forum is on the new Playstation 3, you would want to optimize your forum for PS3 related keywords. This is a highly competitive niche so research, testing, analysis will all take time and patience. Fortunately there are some great resources out there to help you with the search engine optimization struggle. A couple of them are Digital Point and SEO Chat, two great resources for optimizing your forum.

[Read more →]

For the second part of this series lets talk a little bit about webmaster mentality as it relates to forums and ad revenue. Mentality is a key thing in forum management and determining how well you’re doing. Whether you’re looking to retire off your forum or simply cover the costs of operating your forum, your mindset is key to determining how successful you are at those goals. One of the biggest mistakes I see people making is comparing their revenue results to those of a more traditional or static content site and assuming that because they have generally low click through rates, they must be doing something wrong. I’ll admit, when I first monetized my forums I thought this way too, but through time, effort and research I’ve learned that forums by their very nature will have very low rates. The first thing you need to accept when you decide to monetize your forum is this, if you expect your rates to be similar to more traditional sites, then you will be disappointed in the results. [Read more →]