Since starting this site 8 months ago, the administrative load has increased quite a lot. We are now receiving over 2 and half million pageviews a month and as a result of this, the administrative tasks have increased – this has meant that I am not able to comment as much as I would like on the lists. So, this has prompted me to put together this list of things you can do to help the site out – these are all things that will make my job easier- giving me more time to comment and write lists!

10. Wear our Merchandise

Picture 1-23

As you should all know by now, we have a line of our own merchandise! When you buy something from our store it helps us in two ways:

1) We make a small amount of money off each item you buy
2) When you use the items, you are publicizing the site!

In addition – you get the benefit of owning some very exclusive and cool merchandise! Everyone is a winner!

You can get to the store by clicking this link.

9. Shop at Amazon

We have recently added an Amazon advert at the bottom of the right panel of the site. It takes note of the topics on the site and displays items that may be of interest to our users here. It even reads all of your comments to make its decisions. Whenever you click one of those items and go shopping on Amazon, the site generates a small amount of income – even if don’t buy anything from the list. If you click through and buy a camera, for example, we make a few dollars. This is a great way to help the site because it costs you nothing – Amazon makes the donation for you! Try to remember that it is there and use it as your doorway to Amazon.com.

8. Share the Site

Remember to tell all your friends about the site – so many people love the comments more than the lists themselves, and if we have more readers, we tend to get more diverse comments and comments from people with specialized knowledge in the topics – this means we all get to learn more (and I have certainly had a few errors put right by commenters!)

7. Suggest Ideas for Moving Forward

We have now introduced the “Your View” topics and they look like they are going to stay – they even generate more comments than many of the lists! I am interested in ideas for other ways we can extend the site whilst retaining the lists as the major focus. It would be great if you could email me (jamie@frater.com) with ideas. No matter how small or silly the idea may be – send it in – you never know – it could be the start of big things!

One idea in the works is an eBook for the site – I am working on the best way to go about this at the moment, but it is almost certainly going to come up in the future.

6. Take Advantage of our Advertisers

As you know, we have a number of adverts on the site. Some of these adverts are specially customized for the readers here. If you see something of interest in one of the adverts, do take advantage of it – it helps us through advertising revenue and it also helps you because you often get special offers or discounts through them. Those of you running ad blocking software can ignore this point.

Another thing to note is that occasionally an ad slips in which is inappropriate or noisy – if this happens please let me know immediately so I can remove it. I certainly don’t want adverts to be an annoyance!




5. Give Us List Suggestions

We are always on the lookout for list suggestions – we have used many of them in the past and they tend to have good responses because they are the types of things YOU want to see. I can always find new topics myself, but they are almost always things that interest me – if you have an idea, email it and we can expand the topic coverage on the site!

4. Comment On Our Lists

For some of you, this doesn’t need to be said! But for those of you who lurk, do feel free to comment on the lists – we are happy to hear everyone’s point of view. Some of our greatest comments have come from people who have been visiting the site regularly but not commented.

3. Contribute Content

This is my favorite item on the list! It is always a thrill to wake up in the morning and find one or two user contributed lists in my inbox. Almost every contributed list has been popular on the site and readers love to see things from a fresh point of view occasionally. No matter how far out your list idea is – send it in. If you need some guidelines for submissions, you can go here.

2. Do Some Editing

We have a few lists left on the site which quote verbatim from Wikipedia. I would much prefer it if these lists were all written in our own words. So far I have one editor who has kindly offered to help with this job – but if you have a great talent for paraphrasing and English in general, please email me if you think you can spare some extra time in the week to update a list or two.

1. Subscribe to our Feed

At the top right of every page we have a subscribe to RSS feed link and a subscribe to daily email link. These are great ways to get notified of updates to the site. We currently have over 3,000 subscribers – if you haven’t used RSS before, there is also a link to explain it to you. I strongly recommend you sign up – it is a great way to check all of your favorite websites in one place! I spend more time in my RSS feeder every day than Mail.

If you already have an RSS reader, you can subscribe to the List Universe RSS feed here.