Important Announcement Regarding Posting on Forum

[aykhan]

I think it is fair to accept paid adds to the site for selling stuff. This will also be helpful for forum members. Nurseries can be invited to advertise banners on the site.

The other option is also good, probably more convenient ie have a Marketplace subsection and just have people who want to sell place adds in that particular section. Charge them for the add quarterly or yearly. Maybe have a lump sump payment for a year for people who want to post multiple times as they get more plant shipements throughout the year.

I think this will make a alot of people happy. Any seller in the Markeplace should have a star rating option like Amazon, so we can tell the good ones from the bad.

One good thing coming out of this is that our discussion forums will be clean from buissiness oriented people who come in and mess up the atmosphere. If even after this buissiness is attempted on the discussion forums then 3 warnings and then banning from the forum can be considered as reasonable. It will also be good that forum members will have access to sellers directly from the site and can PM them for details. I think best is to charge for advertising or posting in Marketplace rather than ask for discount. You know how we are, we inflate prices then give sale on inflated prices

[khabbab]

Market place subsection is good option. Other suggestions related to rating etc are good too. Lets c what other members say so that some consensus is built on how to do it.

[M Farooq]

Market place subsection is good option. Other suggestions related to rating etc are good too. Lets c what other members say so that some consensus is built on how to do it.

I wish our nurseries were adavanced enough to have their website so that we could see plants like all foreign vendors. Can the webpage owners contact those foreign seed vendors for very low advertisement rates for th sake of experimentation? Advertisements like yahoo and hotmail are very annoying. it could be like gmail style where there are no flashing colourful pictures, moving banners etc.

This forum's population increased exponentially during the last year. But my question are

1) Can we count the no. of visitors? What is the daily count ?

2) I am sure that a very small fraction of members is active in posting, the rest are (ocassional?) readers. One can try making a poll from registered users as to what is their frequency of checking the updates.

Once the stats are clear, that will help.

Regards,

Farooq

[khabbab]

@Farooq, yes we can check the visitors count in detail. For July 2012, unique visitors were 5,340 while total visits were 11,800.
We can also post a poll of how frequent users check update.

But how are these 2 things linked with the section of market place and so on?

[M Farooq]

@Farooq, yes we can check the visitors count in detail. For July 2012, unique visitors were 5,340 while total visits were 11,800.
We can also post a poll of how frequent users check update.

But how are these 2 things linked with the section of market place and so on?

I was just curious just from the marketing point of view. If you look for sponsorship, they might be interested in visitor counts and the geographical distribution of visitor's IP.

[khabbab]

Yes that is correct. I get advertisements for my personal blog off and on and my blog has much less visits then the forum. I am sure the way forum's content is becoming rich exponentially, ads will come.

[Farhan Ahmed]

With so limited options of seed/plant venders available in our country......and lesser publicity of available ones i would request that commercial selling/adds may be looked into. This will assist the forum as well as help the members in acquiring plants/seeds and garden supplies.....

[Syed Adnan]

In my opinion we should think broader , we have narrowed our minds to some rules and not thinking beyond it , in my opinion we should look at the objective of this forum, the vision is to help the gardeners and to have a common group of people with mutual interest so they can share and get benefit from each other. Now if all agree about this Vision then we can judge any issue in a right way .

If selling is allowed on this forum:
1.People lose their focus and discuss more on selling/purchasing
2.People with part time plant selling buisness take over the forum and others lose interest.
3.Many people who want to purchase exotic plants not available easily can have them through purchase.
4. If discounts available for members low price of plants is an attraction to a buyer.

SO in my opinion there are advantages as well as disadvantages but the danger to lose the beauty of forum prevails and overuled the possibility to make it a public selling webpage rather than a hobbiest page.

[aykhan]

Your point is well taken. There are advantages and disadvantages to it. I think disadvantages, especially the ones you mentione,d can be minimized by having a dedicated subsection called Marketplace or something like that. It will just be one of the many sections and anything related to buissiness will be just there. I personally feel that the discussions will continue as they are despite having a sales section. However, ofcourse this is my presumption and your fears may actually turn out to be true.

[Farhan Ahmed]

We can also have Google style adds of Nurseries/shops etc