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Dog Days of Summer, Part I


Brad

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As we await fall practices, one thing always gets lost in the shuffle - the message board's birthday on August 31.  Founded in 1999 (between my sons born in '98 and '00 - now you know why I looked tired going to Saturday games, it wasn't the kids), the site will be celebrating it's 17th birthday next month.  It's been a pleasure and a struggle establishing and maintaining a site throughout the ups and downs of the program and the rudimentary technology available back in the day. Oh, and the summers when no one would post for weeks at a time.  We're still off of peak by a large margin, but it looks like Willie and Company might be re-igniting the program and the community.

It's the latter that I have been committed to.  We didn't even run ads until about 7-8 years ago, around the 2007-08 seasons when we were reaching more than 1,000,000 page views monthly and between the software glitching and the hosted web site package locking up, we had to pay for our own server, hosted at Velcro's place, then later our our own managed server.  Who remembers the days of having to shut the site off to non-members because we were running the machine too hard?  We paid for a lot of ads though, in the Oracle, the USF Magazine, on Bay area radio stations, Google, etc.

The dropoff since 2010 has helped with the server costs as we have been able to downgrade while we wait for the uptick.  We're on a flexible cloud plan now and that helps a lot.

But what this is about is what we need to do.  We need to repeat the stuff the old hands on this site did back in the years of 1997-2005 and that is get others involved, no matter how hard the work.

Today's tip is the obvious, some have heard it before.  A couple real simple things are:

  1.  Word of mouth.  Tell your friends to join up and engage now, get woven into the Bulls community
  2.  Use the Twitter and Facebook (and other) buttons to share with your friends on those social platforms
  3.  Where you can, use the referral buttons the site "handcrafts" for you in the main title bar.  If you are on another social platform or message board where it would be acceptable, you can grab the referral code - image or text - and put in your signature elsewhere.  You can use it many places and if others click on it they will be brought to TBP.

Just do what you can to help others get involved and get connected to other Bulls fans.  We have a chance this season to build on a solid second half of last year.  It would be nice to see us hitting back into the big boy league with page views and members and a lot of activity.

I'm working on a couple other things to try to drive engagement.  I also welcome your thoughts and opinions on ways to do so.

Thanks for being a member here and many more thanks for supporting the Bulls.

Brad

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