Story of IndianJobTalks

[Admin]

Preface:
It did not occur to me out of the blue. I was thinking about it for a long time. Made a couple of unsuccessful attempts which were marred mainly by lack of right contacts and inexperience. Finally I made it and here is how I started my forum.

Niche
Being a discreet reader of webmaster forums like digitalpoint and webmaster world for the past 2 years, I was thrilled to see the webmasters bragging about how much they made out of their websites. So I decided to start a website to call my own. Having had the experience of running a couple of yahoogroups in the past which had something like 8000 members, I did not have to think much on what was my niche. "Jobs for Indians" was the chosen area where I wanted to start. It would garner a large traffic among the Indian mass though a much competed field.

Forum:
Now that the niche is selected the next step was the type of site. I typically liked the yahoogroup functionality of recruiters posting and jobseekers reading and replying. Not much of a work for an admin or moderator. More so because of my next to nothing knowledge of HTML and programming. So I decided to have a forum which will require only very basic understanding of both programming and HTML.

Domain:
With whatever half-baked knowledge I had, I went through the steps required to get my site online.
Had a brainstorming with my friends on the domain name. What I found was that all the catchy domain names which I could think of were taken already. Finally it was decided in favour of IndiaJobTalks.com as it was best descriptive of the theme of my site.

Webindia.com charged charged Indian rupees 500 for registration of my domain for a year. It was a little high but I thought I can recover the cost :)

Hosting:
Hosting charges of webindia was way too high for my budget (Indian rupees 8500 for 50 MB). So I went for 0catch.com which charged 7 USD per month. I chose the six month subscription. There are quite a few php boards out there - invision power board and vbulletin included. But both these boards charged over 150 USD for licencing whereas I was looking for a freeboard. Mybb, SMF and PhpBB were my picks among hoards of options. Finally settled with PhpBB3 as it was a new release.

Installation, 0catch and siteground:
All my attempts to install phpbb with 0catch was futile just the same case with other boards. I discussed the problem with support guys at 0catch. They said the version of php they were using was 4.2 and PHPBB3 required a minimum of 4.3. Now i was in a fix. 0catch refunded my money. However, it turned out to be a bad experience. I again went hunting for a decent webhost - with only difference that I am lot wiser now. Stumbled upon siteground from a search. Members in their support forum had given some great review on this webhost. Decided to try their services after a thorough check on the softwares their servers were running on. Went for a 1 year subscription with them as it waived the one-time installation cost.

I did not even have a control panel with 0catch and webmail was not allowed. It is like a breeze to work with the facilities siteground offers. Even there is a "fantastico" facility and the PHPBB3 was installed within minutes. I am happy and at ease with what I had seen so far.

Online:
Finally my forum is online. It is not as easy as I thought it would be. Google adsense was installed and the forum has been submitted to webdirectories and searchengines. However, most of the time I am sitting inside my forum all alone. Now the hardest part awaits - waiting for the traffic to trickle in. I know it takes time to develop any committed community - may be a few years. But I am determined to make it.

Tailpiece is that the feeling that I am a webmaster now gives a kind of satisfaction, with a place to call my own and a mail address to call my own.

Kannan

[Admin]

Its 3 weeks since I started my forum.
There are 24 members.
Twelve of them joined on their own. (then rest of the 12 are my friends.)
With whatever I know in HTML, I managed to put up a decent looking homepage.
The logo image was made by a kid - 11 years old.

Two vital things for a lively forum are:Traffic from search engines and members.
I am lacking in them both.

For a good rank in the searchengine I have to have many backlinks.
Working at it tho at a slow pace. Once this is in place, search engine will rank me hig in the search term for my keyword. That will result in good organic traffic from search engines which is vital for any site.

At the moment I am doing some advertisements (read it spam) in orkut.
Yesterday I "discovered" my homepage in stumbleupon which resulted in a quick spurt of 45 visitors within minutes.
That I guess is not of much use as the bounce rate is way toooo high.
I am still working at the modalities of effectively using social bookmarking sites like digg and stumbleupon.


More later as and when things happen.......

[Admin]

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since I gave an update.
So here is a curtain raiser for those curious onlookers:

** Its 5 months since i started this forum.
** Started with PHPBB and moved to V-bulletin (180 US$)
** Advertised in another board of a similar niche. (US$ 50 for 6 months)
** Have been submitting to directories.
** Interaction in other webmaster forums and job boards where my signatures get me back links.
** Posting jobs on regular basis.
** Installed Arcade games. 275 games are available on date.
** Got a PR2 for my shabbily designed home page and PR1 for the forum home.

Downside:
Our traffic was increasing from a measly below 10 to 100 a day. Most of them were organic traffic from Google. That was until I bought a sitewide link from another forum which had 1.68 lakhs indexed pages in Google. Until two weeks into the deal, everything was going well. Probably something got triggered in Google and they suspected something amiss as the quantity of incoming links was huge - 19000 in 2 weeks. It was then the Big G (google) put this forum in sandbox.

Sandbox in theory is kind of an incubator where new sites are nurtured until Google is convinced that the site is not a spam site and is here to stay. During this period, we will not be able to rank good in search engines for competitive terms and hence organic traffic will be 10 percent of what the site deserves.

I have asked the sitewide links be removed and put only on forum pages. Now the incoming links are decreasing. Last when I checked it was 16,500 which once was 50,000. Dont know when this forum will be out of sandbox and organic traffic returns back to normalcy. At the moment we are limping back at 10 a day from G. Hope this wait is over at the earlest.


Thats all folks in this edition.

[Admin]

At the moment I can confirm that this site is out of sandbox or penalty or whatever technical term they call with - after 2 long weeks of agonising waiting. Organic traffic has returned and I see that traffic and ranking in SERP (Search Engine result Pages) is better than it was previously. Today I noticed that the site gets a small portion of traffic for some obscure terms which is a good sign.

Looking forward to next pagerank update from google.

All is well that ends well.

Well, thats not an ending at all
Just the beginning of journey on a thorny road.

[Admin]

Hmmm. The traffic to this site increased to over 1100 a day.
I did something (dont ask me what it is :p ) and google again applied the dreaded penalty / filter. Traffic from google dried up to 5 percent it normally get.

This time I know its a "-950 penalty" or "end of the page penalty". All keywords which used to show me up in the front page now showed me in the last page. I knew it was not a ban coz google still showed my site in the top when i search for site:www. mysite.com

Still I am not sure if my action led to this penalty. There are a host of other reasons why a site will receive this penalty.

I did not have a choice to revert back what i did. So i removed some keyword stuffing which could have led to this.

Today morning - the 12 th day after penalty / filter - traffic is back to where it was previously.

Dont really know how many times I have to live-up with this tussle betwen this site and Google.

But let me accept. Google is very very smart.

Summary of google PR update:
PR update 1 :
Home page PR2, Forum home PR1
PR update 2 :
Home page PR2, Forum home PR2, Some internal forum pages PR1
PR update 3:
Home page PR2, Forum home 0, Some internal forum pages PR1
(Forum home dropped to PR0)
PR update 4 :
Home page PR2, Forum home PR2, Some internal forum pages PR1

Basically in the fourth update forum home got its PR2 restored.

I see only the updates number 1 and 2 as regular and the last two updates are more or less ratification only.

However, at the moment things look quite good.

Probably in the next update, I will have a chance to boast about my first ever "google cheque" :D

Looking forward to that. Its a month away from now.

[Yogesh]

You don't need prior experience to work online, but you'll want to identify your most marketable skills to accelerate your success. If you enjoy or are good at writing you'll want to choose a market that features content creation like article writing.

You can also use your personal and work experience to choose a niche you're familiar with. For instance, if you choose the path of article writing you may want to choose a topic you're familiar with to limit the amount of time researching new subject material.

Create a list of skills and life experiences that would provide value to someone else. A topic often overlooked is an illness you've encountered that would provide valuable insight to others.

Another brainstorming idea is to list your hobbies, then find a way to monetize your experience.

Make Your Services Available
In most cases, you won't be hired to work for someone else. You'll form a short term contract to deliver a service or goods.
When first starting out, it's important to create enough exposure to draw interest. Joining freelance networks, forums, creating a blog, and using free classified ads are a great way to draw interest.
As you gain experience and create a reputation as a reliable online worker you'll acquire new projects through customer referrals and recommendations.