It’s been about 2 months since I launched my Florida Gators forum, Gator Envy. It is still my favorite of all the sites I own. The community is growing. The members are awesome. We haven’t had any problems with trolls or spammers. Everyone seems very knowledgable about the topic and willing to help people out.

As of right now there are 109 members and 4,098 posts. My goal by the end of 2007 is to have 1,000 members 75,000 posts. I don’t know if that’s realistic or not. I’m really banking on this site to pick up once football season starts.

Most of the search engine traffic coming in is for ‘florida gator myspace layouts’. That’s not good. It takes the visitors directly to a page in the Fan Zone that has free myspace layouts. While it’s good if they use the layouts because I put a link to Gator Envy in it, it would be much better if my top searches were post topics. People coming in from search engines to find out information about something gator specific are more likely to sign up and post than someone who is coming in just for the myspace layout.

On average we get just over 100 unique visitors a day, with about 40 or more of those returning visitors. Word of mouth is key for this forum. People need to spread the word and tell everyone they know.

To increase posting activity, I will be starting a contest this month. To be eligibile for the prize, all you have to do is average 1 post/day. In everyone’s profile it lists how many posts/day you average. If a member get’s it above 1, they will be eligibile. This might keep people coming back daily to make a post, or they may just post 30 times in 1 day. Either way, I think this contest idea is better than a standard referral contest.

So what’s the grand prize for the winner? An autographed Chris Leak 8×10. Chris Leak was the star quarterback that led the Gators to the National Championship game. He will be drafted into the NFL this April. I haven’t announced the contest on my site yet, I probably will today or tomorrow.

As far as advertisements and making money on the forum…I think I might do my first test run before the NCAA Tourny starts up.