VBSEO - anyone use?

[Mikhailtech]

Recently I've been looking into ways to make some more $$ with my message board. For the first time I came across SEO products, and shortly thereafter I found VBSEO. Does anyone use this software? I've read the "success stories" on their site and can definitely agree with SEO methodology, but I wanted to get a second opinion before biting the bullet.

Any success stories here?

[Fusion2]

It seems to be a love-it or hate-it addon.

Most people seem to find value in using this addon. But, at the same time many of these people convey that the product cost is way over added value.

I often read people saying that the product isnt worth the cost because they could get vBulletin for that cost. Also people seem to place the value around $19 to $49 for this addon, not its current retail price! Lastly, the archive feature works really well in search engines.

So i personally have chosen not to purchase it. I would rather just buy a second vbulletin for that cost.
____________________________________

With forums, content still is king. If you have something interesting to read, then it will attract people in hoards. If its worth discussing then people with discuss it.

The real problem with forums is that forum owners think they will make millions just by having the right forum categories and titles. Thinking "If you build it, they will come".

The reality is that there are thousands are well designed forums and most have fewer then 100 members, usually friends and family etc. It takes good content to get a super forum with 100k members and 1 million posts etc.

This is a lesson i learned with my own forum and i have had to recreate it several times, to find the right niche and content.

My original idea was a south florida community forum covering everything from travel to food to entertainment to nightlife etc. Spent months just determining the right categories and customizing the forum etc. Unfortunate, even though i was getting as many as 20k visits a day, i had no content and thus nobody posted and it was just an empty forum. And way too much for me to write posts to fill.

So now i reinvented my forum to focus on a specific niche that i can actively post threads. But even after several thousand posts, i havent topped more than 1,000 members.

[Mikhailtech]

I understand what you're saying, but here's the thing. I've never had a problem with content. It's the reason why my forum has been relatively successful without any extra marketing to begin with. It's by no means a large community (only about 56,000 posts and a little over 1000 members), but it has been self-sustaining. Most of the promotion I've done has been through sponsored giveaways and a few controversial articles here and there that brought a ton of attention. However, only a handful of people have come from search engines. Since I already have an ok base to keep at least a percentage of new visitors, a major focus right now is bringing in new ones, and my site has kinda sucked as far as search engine placement goes (and Alexa for that matter). I'm thinking it's because I used a PHP script for the site and every time I posted articles it would have a nonsensical URL.

So the thing is, right now I DO want to focus on building it in a way that'll attract as many new visitors as possible - I have my ways of making them stay. Which is why I'd like more opinions on this whole VBSEO thing. $150 is money, but if it gives me significantly more traffic, it's not much of an issue.

[BrettMo]

I use it on my small, but new forum, and I get tons of traffic from Google. Somewhere around 95% of my traffic comes from search engines. If you have the money to spend, do it. But don't expect it to make you as much money as their web site examples.

[Odoin]

The product is okay, but nothing I would write home about. It seems the more unique the BB content the better it works. Two things that I don't like. 1) The price. 2) The fact they limit who can use it by not allowing some BBs with different content to use it.

Mark

[Mikhailtech]

What do you mean different content?

[IPsecure]

Originally Posted by Mikhailtech

What do you mean different content?

If i'm not mistaken i believe your website has to be approved by the owners of VBseo (i could be wrong) this way they keep their product from being associated with any forum they feel is inappropriate.