Company Name: Zoints Inc

Avaliable Products: Forum network and profile system

Product Prices: Free

Site URL: http://zoints.com

Zoints is a community-based network currently utilized by hundreds of forums including many of the largest in the world. If you face any of the three problems listed below that Zoints helps to solve, we'd love for you to join the network.

Quentin Gouedard, owner of Big-Boards.com


About Zoints

Zoints was created by forum owners for forum owners and is designed to solve the three major problems community admin face via a mutually beneficial relationship:

1. Member acquisition
2. Member retention
3. Profitability

Member acquisition - We ALL want more members. Whether you are a new forum with three members or a Big-Board with 30,000, you want more members. How does Zoints send you more traffic?

1. At present time, in excess of 40% of the people joining Zoints are NOT members of a community. Forum members who have joined Zoints are referring people they know because (in my 100% biased opinion) Zoints is a pretty cool social network with a lot to offer. We then actively work to drive those people to your forums based upon interest. For example, if your forum is about music, you would be listed here. As you can see, we match people by interest to forums they might be interested in. And of course, there is also some SEO benefit there.

2. Any site that joins Zoints is listing in our forum directory. It's a PR5 directory (I expect PR6 next toolbar update) that we actively advertise via Google Adwords and Adbrite (and are ramping that advertising daily). MySpace has groups that act like forums. Zoints has communities we drive members to because in our (correct) opinion, a community run by someone with expertise who is so passionate about a subject that they would start a forum on the topic is going to be FAR superior to some group we try to control. People deserve the best, and your forums are just that.

3. When one of your members chooses to utilize Zoints, they are linked to your forum on their profile. As you can see on my profile at the bottom left, i'm a member of quite a few forums. Each time someone views my profile, it's like the internet's equivalent of me telling that person, "I like this forum enough to be a member. You should check it out". Nothing is better than personal referrals. And of course, more incoming links for SEO.

Member retention - Did you know that some social networks brag that in excess of 90% of their members login on a monthly basis? Look around forums on the internet today. We see a very troubling trend. "4,552 members. 332 active members". If your forum has more than 20% of your members logging in on a monthly basis, you should get an award because you are doing FAR better than the average community. Zoints is working to do the same by providing your members with that sticky social network. If a member is actively linked to your forum via their profile on Zoints and checks into Zoints on a regular basis, the chance of them returning to your forum on occasion until they finally form that habit that keeps them coming back increases dramatically.

Profitability - Zoints is a revenue sharing system. When one of your members registers on Zoints, you get a percentage of the Adsense impressions on their profile. Is anyone making a ton of money from Zoints yet? No, but we have forum owners who are in the 6 figure impression range. MySpace receives billions of page impressions per month. As Zoints continues to grow, there's no reason that Zoints would not turn into a significant source of Adsense impressions for forum owners. And as Zoints drives more traffic to your forum, this means more money via traditional methods.


Does Zoints Work as Stated?

The following are statistics from three different forums that utilize Zoints for the time period of July 1st - August 31st. The numbers represent unique page views, the first (and most important) column on Awstats. Bullshido's statistics were copied via Google Analytics CSV.

WritersBeat.com - Awstats

Zoints 754
MySpace Not Significant
Wikipedia Not Significant
MSN 14
Yahoo 58
Google 896

As you can see, Zoints blew away MSN, Yahoo, and came close to sending WritersBeat as much traffic as Google in that time. MySpace and Wikipedia sent no statistically significant traffic.


Bullshido.net (big-board) - Google Analytics

Zoints 6,223
MySpace 463
Wikipedia 5,722
MSN 3,316
Yahoo 38,390
Google 123,749

Bullshido is a big-board forum. Zoints sent far more traffic to Bullshido than MySpace did. Bullshido is well represented on Wikipedia but we managed to beat them as well. MSN once again lost out to Zoints. Yahoo and Google killed us, but that's not surprising for a Big-Board. As Big-Boards have so much indexed content, they're apt to receive more traffic (for now )


LadyMajora.com - Awstats

Zoints 1440
MySpace Not Significant
Wikipedia Not Significant
MSN 18
Yahoo 1915
Google 2165

LadyMajora is a community for women. We once again beat MySpace, Wikipedia, and MSN while being reasonably competitive with the two biggest search engines.

Zoints is still a very small social network compared to entities like MySpace, yet we're sending forums MUCH more traffic because that's exactly what we designed the system to do. MySpace has groups that act like forums whereas we have communities that we actively send traffic to.


How Will Zoints Change My Forum’s Appearance?

In short, VERY little. Most configurations create a link in the navbar and a link under each member’s username as shown here:



If any of your members choose to not participate in Zoints, they can disable it via a simple checkbox in the User CP.


Zoints Tours

Forum Owners: Take the tour

Prospective Members: Take the tour


Privacy

Zoints is in fact quite concerned with the erosion of privacy rights and calls upon you to join organizations such us The Electronic Fontier Foundation. Zoints' privacy policy can be viewed here.


Terms of Service

The short version of our TOS simple states, "Be Nice". We are looking to maintain a social network where people show respect and kindness to each other. The full version version of our TOS can be read here.


How Do I Get Started?

Adding Zoints to your forum is quick and easy. Simply go here and click on "Get started with Zoints". We look forward to working with you!

just because it had almost as many listings does't mean it has anywhere near the same amount of traffic.

Source: Alexa;
Zoints: http://alexa.com/data/details/traffi...url=zoints.com
Google: http://alexa.com/data/details/traffi...url=google.com

I wondered about that myself.

We aren't claiming to be anywhere near as busy of a site as Google. We're stating that we're sending forums that utilize Zoints a lot of traffic. In some instances, almost as much as Google is sending them.

That's just a bit confusing.

What's confusing about it? For the month, awstats for WritersBeat showed the following number of referring page views from Zoints and Google:

Zoints 754
Google 896

Zoints was pretty close to Google for the month. Zoints is designed to drive traffic to forums, and that's exactly what the statistics show we're doing

I got the impression that was search engine listings and in any case how many outbound hits to zoints?