MInti articles are starting to grow, any ideas on how to encourage visitors from search referrals to want to sign up to minti?

What are the benefits of signing up?

good point 

being able to reach parents worldwide and share your own very unique personal parenting experience

No, but what do I get for signing up?

Everysite wants people to sign up these days.... what more will I be getting from your site compared to a non-member?

minti is a stage that enables parents to have a voice and reach out to other parents - which most parents are starved of, you get your village instantly and the knowledge of parenting past down and captured online

you get a resource guide from real parents and real parenting experiences???

if you are not a member you cannot ... write advice, comment on advice, write a minti blog post etc... you can only read and rate advice.

But if I were a search referral, would being able to write advice, a blog etc be compelling reasons for me to sign up?

(This is a rhetoric question btw. I'm just trying to work it out. I don't mean to sound like I'm questioning you guys)

Do you find that having anonymous rating affects quality?

anonymous rating counts for very little weight... we weight member votes much more... and even more the higher yur ranking

ie: if a non member votes 1 star and a level 10 member (highest rank) votes 5 stars... the average for that article would end up being about 4.95 or something like that. We trust the member far more

Can you ask a question without being a member?

also if the in the exampe above if the member vote of 5 stars was only a level 1 member, then the average would probably be 3.9 or something like that.

no you can not ask a question with out being a member... actually i better test that

hahaha okay

ah ha, sorry glad clay got it

confirmed - non members are not able to ask questions... only thing they can do is read most things on the site (apart from private groups etc), and rate articles (although their vote counts for little)

you know clay i dont think we communicate what a member gets and what a non-member gets...i wonder how we can communicate this on an article page with soo much stuff as it is on the page???

I think that restricting articles or sections of articles to members only (for example, I know you don't do that) is counter productive.

To get people to join up, there need to be something a level lower from writing articles or blog posts. The 'instant' benefits I can think of are being able to ask questions, comment on articles or participate in a forum. Not sure rating fits in here

Yeah, I need to know why I should sign up

hmm will have to think more about this...maybe some sort of trial or is that too much

we have is mainly member only, because of abuse

i think dekrazee1 has hit nail on head... "The 'instant' benefits I can think of are being able to ask questions, comment on articles or participate in a forum."

*puts hammer away*

It's the same for every site you see. Everytime I visit something new, and they want me to sign up (and lets be honest, every site wants you to sign up these days) I think the same thing. Why? And unless I wanna do something straight off on the site, I'll just leave.....

"The instant benefits I can think of are being able to ask questions, comment on articles, particapte in a forum and get instant information from real parents"

how about that?

Yup! That last bit is the clincher I think....

instant information from parents I mean

whoo hoo, thanks ur a LEGEND

hahaha no no, team effort

of course but you are really smart and getting us to the "real" point - lol

what about pm capabilities? you need to be a member in order to speak directly with other parents dont you?

and you need to be a member in order to make friends?

personally, if i was looking for something attractive as a parent that would draw me in to sign up to minti, it would probably be something along the lines of "read great advice, and then make friends and speak with the parent who gave the advice" - that way it becomes personal, and something more than you could get from an ask service.

hey richard, yes for both. it just stops abuse :0)

dont worry. i know about abuse weve been watching our members fairly closely for the same reason...

thats awesome richard, how much do i owe u ;0), seriously thanks this is really good stuff

what i meant though is that both are really good reasons to sign up, but may not be prominently displayed enough, or worded in a way that is easy for parents to digest. the service is great. it may be just a matter of making it easy for your average parent. i dont know that you need more functionality - maybe just better blurbs.

yes we do need better blurbs and more thought now about natural traffic coming in, agree

dont know what your thoughts are regarding client side javascript  etc, but something else that we have been looking at are ways of being able to get a lot of information into a very small space, so we can devote more space to guiding and helping the user, and by using tabs in the new layout that we are currently preparing for launch, we have been able to group content into sections.

so for example with minti - advice, q+a, members. that way we can display what is important, but also demonstrate that by simply clicking a tab or mousing over it, variants of the same content can be displayed. eg. members - newest displayed, but tabs shown for movers and shakers and top members. that way not only do you get to show more depth in your member base (maybe 7 or 8 instead of 4), but you have more space to show more about each member. if you wanted to get really fancy you could even do something like what tangler does with its groups page where when you mouseover, more info and options are displayed.

sounds like a lot of hassle for a slightly different layout, but by engineering more space, we are able to put a lot more into showing the user around and helping them in their decision to signup. eg. what the site is about, why youd signup etc. and in a way that does not make the page overwhelming.

don't know whether this helps or hinders, but thought i'd throw it out there anyway.

that didn't really make a lot of sense did it? writing at work in between things, so pardon the illiteracy

no problems. yes, we have looked at that. for us its more if visitors would like it this way, but definitely something to consider..thanks Richard and keep in touch, am going offline now