BoardTracker - Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask..

xxxmanager · 02-06-2005, 02:37 PM

BoardTracker - Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask..

What is BoardTracker?
BoardTracker (www.boardtracker.com) is an innovative forum message scanning service similar to traditional search engine spiders but with many additional unique features including email and icq alerts, spam shrinking and more, as well as powerful message search functions allowing you to search forums even when they don't have their own search facility. BoardTracker has set the standard for forum scanning and carved out a place in the arsenal of every adult webmaster and internet marketer.

Why BoardTracker?
With the ever growing number of boards out there and consequently a huge amount of posts every day it is almost impossible to keep up with them all. So many posts means you can easily miss those that would interest you or may even be about you or your company! BoardTracker comes to the rescue saving you time, money and perhaps even your honour..

Make money with BoardTracker!
Yes it really is true - you can make money by using BoardTracker or at the very least it can help prevent potential loss of income, not to mention loss of reputation! Using the alerts feature of BoardTracker you can create targeted search terms and be notified by email or if you are a premium member also by ICQ (you can actually choose to be alerted by email and ICQ or one or the other or disable alerts completely) almost immediately, allowing you to respond to the thread quickly and hopefully close a sale or initiate a business relationship. An example of this could be if you are a hosting company you can set your search term on BoardTracker to include the following words.. [ "web hosting" server* dedicated ] etc. and then when someone posts asking a question asking about hosting or servers you or your reps can be there with the answers ahead of your competition! Bling Bling!

If you are a company owner employing sales and marketing reps then you should provide them with a BoardTracker account as it is clearly an invaluable marketing tool when used correctly. Each rep can focus on highly targeted areas to maximize potential and minimize time wasted.
Also vital is to know when your business is being talked about so you can defend yourself or your company (if needed) or answer questions from potential or existing clients or partners. BoardTracker helps your customer support team stay in touch with your clients - everyone appreciates a company that is on the ball and always available to answer questions and talk about their products or service. Of course the more you or your staff talk about your business on public forums the more publicity you get and the more brand awareness is developed which is always a good thing.
An interesting side-effect of the BoardTracker alerts mechanism is that people often use it in order to contact program/business owners or reps. In these times of heavy spam filtering it is quite common for emails from potential or existing clients to be blocked or lost in the ether and obviously you can't whitelist everyone, particulary people you don't yet know! So people can easily contact you through any forum just by starting a thread with your company name or other relevant keyword which is likely to trigger your BoardTracker alerts allowing you to respond appropriately.

How to setup and optimize your BoardTracker account..
In order to fully utilize BoardTracker in a way that saves you time and money it is essential that you setup your account and tailor it to your precise needs..
First click on the 'Setup' button at the top of the page and edit the 'Personal Settings' - obviously you will want to ensure the email address and ICQ number are entered correctly and also whitelist the boardtracker.com address so your spam filters don't block it!
Also under Personal Settings you will see 'Index-Page' and 'Spam Shrinker'.. The Index-Page setting allows you to specify which page on boardtracker.com you want to appear when you go to http://www.boardtracker.com - a popular choice is the 'all threads' page. Spam Shrinker as the name implies helps to shrink spam posts. In other words when the same message is posted on 50 boards you wont see a long long page of identical threads on BoardTracker, instead you will see one thread with a row of small text links to the same post on each forum if you select 'join duplicates' or you can choose to hide them completely.
The next section is 'Alert Settings' and here you can choose to subscribe to alerts by email and/or icq - you can also disable alerts completely by simply unchecking the boxes. You can always re-enable them in the future by checking the boxes again. A vital setting here, probably the most important in fact, is the 'Search term' - this is where you define what subjects or keywords interest you and you would like to receive alerts for. For example you could enter your name or company name here as well as the subject or market you work in.
Try to be specific in your search terms otherwise you may find yourself getting too many alerts - entering 'tits' for example will surely result in thousands of alerts! On the other hand when actually searching on BoardTracker you can be less specific in order to get more results as its easy to browse the threads.
Think carefully about what you want to target for alerts, here are some examples to help you get started..
To search for anything relating to 'servers' you could just enter the word 'servers' but this would exclude threads where the word 'server' is used instead. So to ensure that you are alerted in both instances you can use a wild card like so..
server*

To search for a phrase instead of a single word just enclose it in quotes like so..
"web hosting"

To narrow down the search you could exclude words like so..
-free "web hosting"

If you don't like gay bashin threads (I would be surprised if you do

), you can maybe add -"is gay" (might be a god indication for such threads?)..
-"is gay" content affiliate

This will find any mention of web hosting but exclude free web hosting! Beware though: it will also block all hosting threads that happen to have the word free (like 'looking for free advise on good web hosting'). Decide which words to exclude carefully.
This one will search for "web hosting" but it will only return a result if "adult" is also in the thread..
+adult "web hosting"

You can have several different terms together like so..
-free +adult "web hosting" server* cpanel "your name" "your company" content

View the search term help below the form on the settings page for full details on how to setup searches..
BoardTracker's Setup Page

Spam Shrinker, Index-Page, ICQ alerts and a few other nifty features (like search by Author and Authors threads) are <a href="http://www.boardtracker.com/cgi-bin/premium.pl">premium account</a> features so you really should upgrade to take full advantage of BoardTracker! See the following link for a full list of features available in free and premium accounts..
BoardTracker's Premium Accounts

For companies with several employees ask us about special corporate rates for multiple BoardTracker accounts!

What does BoardTracker do for board owners?
Some board owners worry that they may lose business to BoardTracker but in fact what generally happens is quite the opposite. BoardTracker often becomes the top referrer of new members to a board as many board owners will verify - BoardTracker helps to build your board membership, activity and traffic in general.
It is important to remember that the internet is global and many board members and viewers will not be in the same timezone as the board itself and will often not see threads they may otherwise post in simply because by the time they wake up and logon those threads have scrolled off the front page never to be seen again. BoardTracker ensures that everyone will always find any thread that interests them no matter when or where it was posted.
Another common concern is that the BoardTracker spider will place undue load on a boards servers and this is simply not the case. In fact BoardTracker often removes load from a board for example by offering a search engine that does not need to access the boards database at all as the relevant data is stored locally - this can be a lifesaver for a very busy board that would otherwise have no easy way to offer its members searchable threads.