Edit Your Profile?

[TFP Admin]

I made some modifications to the member profile area and now you have more fields and more room. The information you put in these fields will appear on your profile page. None of these are mandatory - you can leave them blank if you want - but the profiles are routinely crawled by search engine spiders and any flooring related information you put there is very good for us when people search for those terms at Google, Yahoo! or any other search engine.

Editing your profile is very much appreciated: Edit Profile To show my appreciation, I will be giving away a Quick Step UniFix Repair Tool to two different members. There will be some requirements to win the tool, two of which include being a flooring professional in the sales, installation or repair fields and having your profile filled out to indicate laminate flooring is one of the products you specialize in.

I will post a contest announcement in the next few days that will have the complete rules and eligibility requirements. This is a pretty nice prize. There was a discussion of the tool here: Unifix laminate tool Stay tuned for more on this contest. In the mean time, please take the time to see if you would like to add more information to your profile.

Thank you,

TFP Admin

[TFP Admin]

Here are reasons why I think the profile is important (as seen on the Who's Online page):

And I like seeing this too:

T

[Peter Kodner]

Admin, I have updated mine and will try to remember to do this on a regular basis. Nothing better than free advertising, eh?

I looked at my profile and saw a line called "referrals". What is that?

[Nick Arrera]

I have updated mine also .. I do believe it is people you referred to the site peter ..

[kwfloors]

I just did mine too.

[rusty baker]

I could lose 30 pounds and edit my profile.

[Peter Kodner]

Dang! I've handed out about 100 TFP biz cards and only one of the bastards has shown up!!!!! Their loss...

[TFP Admin]

The referrals is the number of people who have joined AND put your forum name down as the referrer during registration. If the person who joins contacts me later and tells me they forgot and lets me know who referred them, I can put that member name in so they get the credit.

This is another good reason to use your real name. If the person joining puts the wrong name in the box, it doesn't get recorded. Then again, there are those who don't fill in any of the boxes unless they have to, just to get through the registration quicker. Nothing wrong with you contacting them to ask them to drop me an email or PM to correct their omission. Just remember, there can only be one name.

I thought about using the referral system for a contest once. Maybe I'll think about it again. To be fair, it wouldn't count the number already accumulated, but over a period of time during the contest. Heck, if we can have a contest only laminate sellers, installers and repairers can win, we could have a contest only those who refer new members could win.

Anyway, thank you to those who have edited your profiles. Looking very, very good. I encourage others to do so as well. If anyone has a question about the profile, or any suggestions, now's a good time to bring it up. And you don't have to be a pro to use the profile system - you just wouldn't fill out the 2 bottom boxes.

T

[TFP Admin]

I wanted to bring this up again because I noticed that search engine spiders continue to spend time looking at the profiles of our members.

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As you can see, they also crawl the threads on the forum, including this one (Edit Your Profile?). But at about a quarter to 10 tonight, I saw a bunch of spiders checking out nearly a dozen of our member's profiles. The reason they are interested in the profiles is because of the modifications I made to the system last October in trying to attract spiders to relevant content that gets recorded by the search engines. Then, when someone does a search for a specific term or phrase, especially flooring related, they will find our forum here.

Your profile is also an excellent way to advertise your business. We have a rule that prevents you from directly soliciting business in your messages, but you are allowed to use your profile to promote your business (you can also use your signature area, but I will use another topic to discuss that). I have tried to give you several places to add information that will let you put as much or as little information as you like.

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You can let people know exactly who and where you are, but you also do not have to reveal any identifying information and still provide plenty of keyword rich information for our friendly search spiders. If you have a website, there is a place to enter the address. That will become a link that anyone can follow from your profile and it also shows up when someone clicks your name in a message on the forum (go ahead and click my name next to my avatar and you'll see "Visit TFP Admin's Home Page!").

Unfortunately, there are far too many of these:

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Yes, you can leave all your profile fields blank, but it would be so much more helpful to The Floor Pro Community and to you if you filled out even a couple of the fields with minimal information. Here are a few examples of profiles of our members:

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Again, it's not mandatory. You don't have to do anything. I appreciate your visits and your participation. But this website has the potential to be so much more to so many more and I want to do all I can to help - but I need your help too. I have always said that it's you members that make this website what it is. All I do is the pointing and clicking. Well, I am asking you to do a little pointing and clicking now. Please click this and edit your profile.

Thank you ,

TFP Admin